OPINION: After months of seeing videos and teasers about the AI-powered pin, I finally got to see the Humane AI Pin for myself at MWC 2024. It’s an incredible feat of engineering that’ll likely find its niche in a growing smartphone accessory market, but this isn’t, as some have suggested, the replacement for the smartphones we know and love.
The Humane AI Pin is an interesting concept; it’s a square-ish plastic pin that sits on your chest, magnetically attached to your t-shirt like the Insta 360 Go 3 action cam to avoid making holes, of course. It looks largely unassuming, available in a handful of colour options, but things get interesting once you wake it up.
I’d like to think of the Humane AI Pin as Google on your chest – though I’m not sure Google would appreciate that analogy – as it uses on-device GenAI capabilities to provide you with information in a conversational way, much like you’d expect from the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s own Gemini assistant.
It can handle general knowledge queries, currency conversion – with one demo at the show getting a conversion from US Dollars to Euros without telling the Pin where we were in the world – and like a growing number of GenAI models, it can handle real-time translation too, though there was still quite a delay between speaking and translating in my MWC demo that would stilt an actual bi-lingual conversation.
![Humane AI Pin](https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/02/Humane-AI-Pin-1-3-1024x768.jpg)
There’s even a built-in camera that can be activated by a tap of the touchpad or controlled via voice input, providing a more natural way to capture photos and videos without focusing on your phone. It’s an idea that works exceptionally well on the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, and I expect people to appreciate it just as much here.
The most Sci-fi aspect of the Pin, for me, is its projection capabilities. Using a built-in system, it can project simple graphics like time, battery life and other information to the palm of your hand if it’s positioned correctly in front of the Pin.
![Humane AI Pin projection](https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/02/Humane-AI-Pin-1-1-1024x768.jpg)
Frankly, it’s not that great. It reminds me a lot of the Oppo Air Glass 2 smart glasses I used at MWC last year, complete with basic graphics and a single green colour, which makes it less than ideal to, say, preview that photo you just took,.but I imagine this is something that’ll improve drastically as tech gets smaller and more powerful.
So, yes, the Humane AI Pin is cool – very cool, in fact – but it won’t be replacing the humble smartphone anytime soon, if ever.
Elements like a conversational chat assistant and a built-in camera are very handy, but even with better projection technology, I can’t see many people ditching the stunningly high-res screens and capable cameras that most modern smartphones have for something like that.
Instead, I foresee a future where the two are used in conjunction with one another; the Humane AI Pin for basic queries, quick phone calls and snaps, while a phone continues to be the ‘main’ device for most.
![Humane AI Pin](https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/02/Humane-AI-Pin-1-4-1024x768.jpg)
Of course, I could be totally wrong. We could be headed towards a Star Trek communicator-style world and I’m just a bit of a Luddite, but I doubt it.