I think it would be really cool if it worked like they wanted us to believe it would. Like, it could be one of those “change the way we live our day to day lives” events to the like of of smartphones becoming mainstream.
This device was never going to live up to that or get anywhere close to it, but I can’t blame people for really wanting to believe.
Huh? What do you think they promised that wasn’t delivered that would’ve made this anything that a phone app couldn’t do better? Fundamentally, talking to things sucks, but phones support that anyway. The gimmicky interface is worse than just a touch screen. You have to wear the fucking thing which makes it useless if I’m in bed or whatever. The AI was shit but could just as easily be integrated into an app. It was a shit product from design to execution.
The thing is, even if the device was doing what they said it would do... It could be an app. In fact it makes more sense. No double network subscription, no need for expensive hardware on top of the one you already carry, expanded acess to the user's data, better hardware in some case (camera for example), more efficient, more integration with other tools (from basic stuff like a calendar to gps etc), and so on.
If AI was a juice the humane pin would be it's juicero.
I don’t get it. It was so easy to call this, Rabbit, home 3D TVs, the Fire Phone, etc.
What do we see that these execs don’t? Why can I call flops 5 seconds after hearing them but they go on to spend millions to develop products which go nowhere?
The subscription makes sense for having LTE access. That’s not really a problem nor hard to justify. Even the concept sounds pretty solid overall. But everything from price to execution was just wildly bad.
I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget's review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.
Maybe I'm too old-school and impatient, but I've never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It's a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I've used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.
The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I've never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.
I stopped all voice assistants when they started getting snippy with me for being rude to them. I don't need a poorly design if statement snapping back at me for showing my frustration at its inability to do a basic task.
Yeah. And it's so bad that I feel like the functionality barely goes down.
They should release the following:
'Out of an abundance of caution, we advise against any user charging this device and attempting to rely on it for communications or regular assistance. Fortunately, we've found a workaround and suggest customers looking to continue enjoying the benefits of the Humane pin consider wearing it down in an unpowered state. This will provide infinite battery life and a 100% reduction in unwanted heating while enabling users to continue to receive nearly all the same functionality to which they are accustomed.'
Mostly Imran Chaudhri's reputation, really. The guy created the user interface and interaction designs for the iPhone and worked on a bunch of other Apple stuff. Most of the press material i've seen before the release of the AI pin mostly concentrated on him.