PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1: The smartphone
ACCUSED OF: Stealing your attention, sanity and well-being
REWARD: Some new AI-powered gadget, costing up to $699
After years of smartphone innovation, a new crop of devices aims to free us from them. AI assistants are embedded in your glasses or a pin on your lapel. Some don’t even require a smartphone to be nearby. Imagine it! Our hands free once again to eat, push strollers, brush our teeth.
Humane, a San Francisco-based startup, put its AI computer in a $699 pin. Rabbit, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup, put it in a little red $199 box. Meta added AI to its camera-equipped $299 Ray-Ban smart glasses.
They look different but the tech is similar. The virtual assistants, powered by large language models, use cameras to see and microphones to hear. Then they try to assist you. An elephantine emphasis on the word try.
The Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin are more science project than finished product. In my weeks of testing them, I often wondered: What did I do to deserve this? The error messages. The delayed response times. The always-dead batteries. My 2-year-old heard the Humane pin say “Input passcode” so many times he started running around the house yelling it.
Meanwhile, Meta has made a simple, smartly priced gadget that should be the envy of other tech giants.
When Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant came on the scene a decade ago, we expected assistants with real smarts everywhere. No screens or little boxes required. We never got that. Now, generative AI might succeed in giving us the incredible, invisible computer. These are the first real attempts to deliver it.
The options
Behold, your buffet of AI gadgets:
Humane AI Pin: Your grandma’s heavy brooch designed by Iron Man’s stylist. Clip the cell-connected device to your shirt, hold down on the touchpad and ask your question. Stick out your hand and the built-in “laser ink” display projects right on your palm—which is hard to see outdoors. Also, good luck not looking like a mime when trying to get it to work.
Rabbit R1: You don’t wear the bright red Rabbit. Instead, the box, about the size of a pack of Kraft Singles, comfortably fits in your pocket. Press and hold the button to ask the assistant a question and use the scroll wheel to navigate through the on-screen menus.
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: Tom Cruise’s famous “Risky Business” Wayfarer sunglasses but with a camera and microphones. Just say “Hey Meta…” and the assistant is there. Unlike the other two, which connect directly to cellular or Wi-Fi, this one is dependent on a smartphone.
While they all have their own particular hardware foibles, they all share a big one: Since there’s no keyboard, you’re constantly talking out loud to these things. Hope your friends and family have good noise-canceling headphones.
The tricks
To see them in action, I strapped them all to my body and went on a testing tour.
Visual recognition. The devices’ cameras and generative-AI connection enable you to ask questions about whatever you’re looking at. I visited Bideawee, a pet adoption center in New York. And yes, all three gadgets could tell the difference between a cat and a dog, but only Meta consistently named breeds, which seemed fairly accurate.
Party tricks aside, Meta did a better job with contextual answers, too. When I stared at an adorable puppy and asked what I should feed him, the Meta assistant replied, “A Great Dane puppy requires a high-quality, large-breed puppy food that is rich in protein, moderate in fat and contains appropriate vitamins and minerals.”
Meta may have a bad rap for data collection and creepy ads, so maybe this will trigger Purina promos. The company says the photos and videos captured aren’t used for personalized ads though the Meta AI feature is subject to the company’s terms of service, which does state it could use AI prompts to improve its products.
Language translation. Humane and Rabbit promise live translation in over a dozen languages, so I stopped by Manhattan Mandarin to meet with my patient new tutor, Michelle Tomizawa.
The Rabbit just wouldn’t work. It took four whole minutes to translate a basic guidebook phrase like “Where’s the bathroom?” You know what’s faster? Checking every hallway in the building. The company says a fix was released in a software update Thursday.
With the Humane pin, though, we had an actual conversation—me in English, Michelle in Mandarin. I asked for directions to the bathroom (upstairs and on the left), if there were nuts in the dumplings (no) and what to do in Beijing. (Here I come, Forbidden City!)
Yet when we went for lunch at a Chinese restaurant, the pin translated everything the waitress said into…Spanish! It took a hard restart to fix. (Watch my video to see it unfold.)
Meta’s glasses don’t do live audio translation. They will translate the text of select languages in a photo or sign—just not Mandarin.
General assistance. These assistants don’t just repeat what’s on the web, like Siri or Alexa. Each gave me accurate details about planting tulips and grilling a steak.
Yet the advanced AI assistants couldn’t do some smart-assistant basics, like set a timer. When I asked the Rabbit to play Taylor Swift’s latest album, it promptly played a song from 18 years ago! Plus, getting an answer from Humane and Rabbit can take so long there should be hold music.
Rabbit and Humane have already released software updates to address some issues. They plan to release more.
The future
Tech companies are all talking about the next big phase: AI agents. These personal assistants will anticipate our needs and then go deal with them for us.
It makes sense that this more humanlike assistant will need to live in a gadget that can see and make sense of the world. It also makes sense that it would connect to the most important device in our lives.
So yes, there are two AI gadgets that will be of service to you right now. One is the smartphone you already own.
The other? Those cool Meta Ray-Bans. Not only are Meta’s AI tools fun and reliable but the glasses’ built-in cameras make it easier to take pictures and videos when I’m playing with my kids.
Life is pretty great when you’re not looking down at a screen. Or YELLING AT A BROOCH IN A RESTAURANT!
Write to Joanna Stern at [email protected]