'Humane' Demos New Features on Its Ai Pin - Which Starts Arriving April 11

Indian Express calls it 'the ultimate smartphone killer'. (Coming soon, its laser-on-your-palm feature will display stock prices, sports scores, and flight statuses.)

Humane's Ai Pin can even translate what you say, repeating it out loud in another language (with 50 different languages supported). And it can read you summaries of what's on your favorite web sites, so 'You can just surf the web with your voice,' according to a new video released this week.

The video also shows it answering specific questions like 'What's that song by 21 Savage with the violin intro?' (And later, while the song is playing, answering more questions like 'This was sampled from another song. What song was that?') But then co-founder Imran Chaudhri — an iPhone designer and one of several former Apple employees at Humane — demonstrated a 'Vision' feature that's coming soon. Holding a Sony Walkman he asks the Pin to 'Look at this and tell me when it first came out' — and the Pin obliges. ('The Sony Walkman WM-F73 was released in 1986...') In another demo it correctly supplied the designer of an Air Jordan basketball shoe.

They're also working on integrating this into a Nutrition Tracking application. (A demonstrator held a doughnut and asked the Pin to identify how much sugar was in it.) If you tell the Pin that you've eaten the doughnut, it can then calculate your intake of carbs, protein, and fats.

And in the video the Pin responded within seconds to the command 'Make a spreadsheet about top consumer tech reviewers on YouTube [with] real names, subscriber counts, and URLs.' It performed the research and created the spreadsheet, which appears on the demonstrator's laptop, apparently logged in to Humane's cloud-based user platform.

In the video Humane's co-founder stresses that its Ai Pin does all this without downloading applications, 'which allows me to stay present in the moment and flow.' But while it can also make phone calls and sends text messages, Imran Chaudhri adds that 'Ai Pin is a completely new form factor for compute. It's never been about replacing. It's always been about creating new ways to interact with what you need. So instead of having to sit down to use a computer, or reaching in to your pocket and pulling out your phone and navigating apps, Ai Pin allows you to simply act on something the moment you think about it — letting AI do all the work for you.'

Or, as they say later 'This is about technology adapting and reacting to you. Not you having to adapt to it.'

There's also talk about their 'AI OS' — named Cosmos — with the Pin described as 'our first entry point' into that operating system, with other devices planned to support it in the future. (Mashable's reporter notes that Humane's Ai Pin is backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and writes 'I was impressed with how well it worked.')

The video even ends with an update for SDK developers. In the second half of 2024, 'you're going to be able to connect your services to the Ai Pin using REST APIs and OAuth.' Phase two will let developers run their code directly on Humane's cloud platform — while Phase three will see developers codes on Ai Pin devices, 'to get access to the mic, the camera, the sensors, and the laser. We are so excited to see what you're gonna build.'

Humane says its Ai Pin will start shipping at the end of March, with priority orders arriving starting on April 11th.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.