Inside Humane's Wearable AI Device: A Closer Look at Innovation and Functionality

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. With the launch of ChatGPT, AI came to the forefront for a lot of people for a lot of different use cases. And there is a new company called Humane that recently came out with a wearable AI demo that is pretty wild, in my opinion.

0:43And so I want to talk about some of the new features that are on that and what we might see from similar tools in the future. So all this to say, this is coming from Eram Chaudhary, who is the co-founder of Humane, And he was actually a previous product designer at demo or at Apple who helped create a whole host of their different products from some of the earliest computers all the way down to the iPhone and then all the way to the Apple Watch. So he's really been into this whole device space for quite a long time and he's developing a new device that incorporates AI into your everyday life. So to give you an idea of what this looks like, the device pretty much looks like a really small black puck that can slip into your breast pocket.

1:29It has a camera, it has a projector, it has a speaker, and that is kind of on the top of it. And recently, Chaudhary, he went on to TED and he gave a TED Talk. Parts of the TED Talk were leaked, but now the whole thing is available, so I recommend you go and watch it. but he essentially walks through a bunch of use cases for this new tool and how it can bring AI into your life how can it make how can how it can make things more useful for you so one of the demos that he recently showed on this was it was you know kind of like a gimmick in the middle of his presentation his like his device started ringing and then he like pulls up his hand and it projects straight onto his hand like your wife is calling and like an answer and a decline button he's like oh sorry I ought to get this and like answers and has a little conversation with his wife and then hangs up but that's demonstrating the ability it has a little projector on it that projects straight in front of you and for him he's saying these devices are getting smaller and smaller from the computer to the phone to the watch and now it's going to you know this little projector that is going to be on your hand or this little device that's going to go in your pocket so another thing that he demonstrated on this was the ability to ask it questions he can press and hold a little button on the top of the device and ask it, you know, where he can buy a gift.

2:45And the device responds with the name of like a local shopping district he can go to. He also tapped a couple fingers on the device and says a sentence. And then the device translated that into and translated and spoke it into French, which I'm assuming is what he had a program to do. But what was interesting about this is it spoke it in his actual voice. So I was using, you know, voice cloning for this. Now, I don't know if this is something they've baked in-house, like that voice cloning tool. There's 11 Labs does it really well right now. Anyone can go upload five minutes of audio and it can clone your voice.

3:20So, and 11 Labs just launched in like five or six new languages. So I don't know if that's something they have in-house or not, but it's not necessarily impressive. Like there is other technology. So it's not just necessarily technology. I think for him, it's the idea, it's the device and the idea that there is a new device that you can use that can bring AI into your life. And whether they do it themselves or partner with Eleven Labs or someone else for some of these like software AI solutions, I'm not sure is like super relevant. But it is definitely interesting. It does have a lot of use cases.

3:52Now, you know, what is the difference between pulling out your phone and doing this? He says that phones are kind of cumbersome and pulling them up and asking it, you know, how to get somewhere or how to do something takes time. Whereas this can be a lot simpler a lot faster. It's right there. You can tap it But like also I mean to play the devil's advocate here If you just like duct taped your phone to your front pocket right below you I'm sure you could get your phone to do like a lot of these different things Like I guess you can make like a hotkey or something to integrate with Google Translator I don't know something any case.

4:25I won't hate on it too much Like I think it is a cool device. It is very interesting but also it's important to say like do we need a device or do we have something we already have that can do this in any case another thing he says um he taps the device and says catch me up and it reads out a summary of all of his recent emails calendar events and messages i'm assuming it summarizes them so um using ai to like get like a good summary of what's happening and not having to literally read him word for word everything um another thing he does is that he holds up a chocolate bar in front of the device and presses his fingers on it and says, can I eat this?

4:59And the device recommends he does not eat it because he has a food allergy. He then presses his finger down and says he's going to eat it anyways. And then it says, okay, enjoy. And he's like, I love how it's like, doesn't judge me and stuff. And like, I don't know, whatever. He programmed it to say that. But anyways, another cool tool, another super cool tool, but also like, could you just take your phone and take a picture of a wrapper and on an app that's like a food allergy detection app and it tell you if you can eat something like yeah definitely so I think it's interesting I think his idea is that um we're going to be moving to incorporating AI into our life he's really against like the whole AR VR glasses thing he doesn't feel like that in like he feels like that sets us apart and takes us out of the real world um and you know it's kind of like blocks you off whereas this is like really incorporated into everything you do.

5:51And to that, I do agree. I do think that distinction is important. And I think he's just trying to create a lower friction product that you can use for a lot of really useful things. And so the other thing I do think that is valuable about this is it doesn't necessarily replace, it doesn't replace a phone. You probably still have your phone in your pocket, like paired to this thing, Bluetooth. It's almost like a smarter version of like an Apple Watch. It also begs the question of you could, if you could just incorporate a camera into an Apple Watch and do all of these same things, or a camera and a projector, I don't know, or perhaps you don't want a watch on your wrist and this would be useful.

6:28Anyways, I do think it's an impressive demo. I'm not 100 % sure if this is actually fully functional. You know how these tech companies are with demos these days. Sometimes they, you know, make it look like it's a little bit more developed than it still is. There is a few questions I have about this product, though, beyond just that number one is if you don't have a pocket on your shirt how does that work do you just clip it to your shirt is that gonna look dorky or bad I don't know um also he's calling it a demo but we've never actually seen him use the projector buttons or the voice commands it kind of just did what like he pushed a button and it just did the thing but he never told it to do anything so it's like that all could just be pre-recorded buttons he was pushing you know what I mean, anyways, maybe it's real, maybe it's not.

7:15I'm not 100 % sure. One thing during the demo, he had it translate into French. I'm not sure how he set that default. So there's just a bunch of different things where I'm not 100 % sure how developed this thing actually is. He did mention, though, that this thing is going to be described as like a privacy first and safe device. And I think that that is going to be one of the biggest issues and things that are top of mind for people before you go and strap a camera to the front of your chest like how is that being used what is that able to see like do you turn that thing off when you go to the bathroom like come on like think of some of the these use cases and in addition to that like a really big product now um is like those little sliders that you put on top of your laptop camera right you can slide it off and it literally puts something blocking your laptop camera because we know a lot of hackers are able to hack into your laptop camera with different malware different things and watch you, which is a very, you know, that feels like a major violation of privacy, obviously.

8:14So much so this product that in a recent laptop I purchased from Lenovo, it literally built into the camera has like a manual, like camera blocking switch. So on a tool like this, how does that work? Like when is the camera on? When is it off? How do you know it's private and safe? I think those are gonna be really important questions. Also, how bright is the projector? How loud is the speaker? is this going to work in daylight he was in a dark theater when he was giving this presentation if this is in a crowd are you going to be able to hear it there's a lot of just different questions I think I would be curious to ask him what about third-party apps am I going to be able to get uber and spotify on here so I think there's a lot of different questions for him I believe this is a very early stage demo it's going to be interesting to see how this moves forward but I think broadly speaking this is a good concept to be considering now whether or not his product is fully developed because ai is going to be integrated into all the tools we currently use is going to be integrated into our everyday life and so i think it's going to be important to stay on top of these different products and different ways that ai is uh trying to be brought into everything from the software we use on our computers to like in the literal room with us with a device like this so it's going to be interesting to follow and see how this progresses in the future