Humane and its AI-boosted anti-smartphone seem to be heading for a brick wall

© Humane.com

It's a paradox: Humane, and its “AI Pin”, is arguably one of the best ideas of recent years to tie a new dealmore human with the hyperconnectivity of the 2020s. But the technology may be arriving just a little too early. Not by much; the problem being that the firm depends on AI advances on the OpenAI side, and that it is the performance of their API and network as much as the hardware part that ultimately determines the true usability of the product.

Indeed: what could be more annoying than having to wait several seconds to perform the slightest action by voice. And again, according to feedback, when it works or when the functionality is not, for the time being, disabled. Not that the product is selling badly for the first of a startup like Humane. Sales are actually even worse than that.

Humane misses AI Pin launch

In total, some 15,000 units sold for $699 (plus a mandatory 5G + OpenAI subscription) have been sold so far, according to a source close to the case cited by The Verge. Of this total, some 8,000 AI Pins were quickly returned by customers. Which, if these figures are confirmed, would represent more than half of the units sold.

Not to mention the thousand units close to being sold, but whose order was apparently cancelled at the last minute by the customer following rather negative tests by the cream of American YouTubers like Marques Brownlee, or specialized sites. And what a missed opportunity! Sales of the product and its accessories are said to have generated just $9 million.

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While the equivalent of $1 million worth of units was returned by very disappointed customers. Ridiculous amounts compared to the last fundraising of $200 million obtained recently. Everything seems to change by order of magnitude while the firm was betting on a target of 100,000 AI Pin sold… while it is rather around 10,000 units sold at launch that Humane must deal with.

For its part, the startup is making significant internal changes to try to quickly improve the usability and image of the product. Thanks to the new models from OpenAI, in particular the new Voice Mode from GPT-4o and a slightly more powerful hardware part, it seems a priori possible to overcome these difficulties – subject to adequate components available at the right price which are difficult to secure for such a young company.

Another much-desired area for improvement: providing the product with a way to interact with real Android apps. Instead of a completely new operating system that developers have so far abandoned.

• New alarming signals are surfacing around sales of Humane's AI Pin.
• The problem is that a majority of customers would return the product – in a context of sales 10 times lower than forecasts.
• The firm is undergoing major internal changes.

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