Humane's $699 AI Pin is basically broken

The dream of ditching your smartphone and living in the moment just hit a very expensive brick wall.

Humane has spent the past year hyping its AI Pin as the harbinger of a post-smartphone era. For $699 upfront plus a mandatory $24 monthly T-Mobile subscription, this screenless wearable promised to handle your calls, texts, and daily tasks through pure ambient AI.

Testing reveals a harsh reality: the device simply does not work.

Solid metal, awkward daily reality

On paper, the industrial design is the one thing Humane got somewhat right. Roughly the size of half a pack of gum and weighing about 55 grams, the aluminum pin feels like a premium, solid piece of tech.

It attaches to your clothing via a magnetic battery booster right below your collarbone. You hold the touchpad to talk to CosmOS, double-tap to snap a photo, or tap and hold with two fingers to shoot video.

In actual life, wearing it is an exercise in social awkwardness. Standing on a sidewalk tapping your chest and whispering to an AI draws weird stares from everyone nearby.

It also gets in the way of everything. Backpack straps scrape across it, messenger bags cover the camera, and children or pets trigger it by accident. Unless you shell out another $50 for a clothing clip, keeping it securely on your chest without disruption is a chore.

A smart assistant that fails at the basics

Things get significantly worse the moment you actually try to use it. Every single query gets routed to Humane's cloud servers to run through models like GPT-4.

That architecture makes the device agonizingly slow. You ask it to make a note, wait ten seconds in silence, and half the time receive a generic error saying it failed.

Basic phone functionality is completely broken. In testing, roughly half the outgoing calls failed to dial, while half of incoming calls went straight to voicemail without ringing. It requires its own separate phone number on T-Mobile, meaning it cannot even share your existing line.

Even more staggering are the everyday tasks it cannot do at all. The AI Pin cannot set a timer. It cannot set an alarm. It cannot check your calendar or add an event to your schedule.

Meanwhile, the hardware cannot handle the strain. After just a few minutes of use, the device turns into a literal hand warmer and shuts down to cool off, even in 40-degree weather. Battery life is equally disastrous, draining completely in five hours while sitting untouched in a backpack.

Humane co-founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno defended the product by calling it the first page of ambient computing and promising a major software patch this summer. But customers have to live with the hardware in the box today.

Why it matters

We think the AI Pin is a textbook lesson in the dangers of AI hardware hubris. Trying to leap straight to a screenless future before basic voice computing is even reliable is setting money on fire.

For users, there is zero reason to buy this. Spending over $700 in device and carrier fees for something that cannot set a pasta timer or reliably make a phone call is an impossible sell.

Humane made a critical miscalculation: visual interfaces exist because they are fast, private, and offer instant verification. Forcing every micro-task through a cloud-based LLM creates immense latency, burns battery, and overheats tiny wearable processors.

Until local models can run instantly on low-power chips, the smartphone remains utterly undefeated. Ambient computing might be the future, but Humane rushed to market with a prototype and charged flagship prices.