There are always five or eight phones on my desk at any given moment. And I refer to any arrangement of tables and counters in my home as "my desk." So I did what any rational person would do and grabbed the nearest phone to try making my own AI wearable when I saw the Humane AI Pin reviews start rolling in last week.
Humane wants you to think that their AI Pin embodies the most advanced consumer technology available. Reviews and the internal components of the pin indicate otherwise: it appears to run a customized version of Android 12 and is powered by a Snapdragon processor from four years ago.
"This is a mid-tier Android phone." At the following team meeting, I made this declaration while symbolically brandishing a mid-range Android phone. "Gemini is easy to download and stick on your shirt!" Easy. Insignificant. I said, "Give me ten minutes, and I'll whip up a more powerful AI gadget."
You guys, hardware is hard.
My ideal device would have an external camera and a good hands-free voice assistant. Although it was an interesting idea, the idea of having an iPhone in a shirt pocket never worked out since, 1) none of my clothes had pockets, and 2) Siri isn't that intelligent. So my first prototype was just a Motorola Razr Plus around my shirt collar. Naturally, this did not work, but not for the reasons I had thought.
First off, a foldable phone cannot be used to download Gemini from the Play Store. I was unaware of that. However, I still encountered difficulty using a voice assistant from a flip phone's cover screen, even after I had sideloaded it and made it my default assistant. Before you can do much more than say "Hey Google" to grab the Razr's attention, it needs you to flip the phone open.
I found what I was looking for when I ran Gemini in Chrome on the cover screen. However, using Google Lens out of the corner of my eye and attempting to press buttons on the screen to activate the assistant weren't working so well. Furthermore, Gemini mistook the term "recycle" on a toothpaste tube for the word "becicle," which it assured me was a bygone euphemism for spectacles. It's not!
The second prototype was the same Razr flip phone with the cover screen running ChatGPT in conversation mode. This meant that the app was not practical because it meant that it was always listening and operating. I nevertheless decided to give it a try, and speaking with an invisible AI chatbot was an odd sensation.
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