Humane debuts a $699 AI pin I'd be far too nervous to wear in public

pcgamer.com:

As with all emergent tech, AI has been an absolute rollercoaster. We've gone from funky deep-dream psychedelia and crunchy robot voices that sort of sound like Spongebob to a legal and ethical minefield. While it's been used for some cool stuff, like DLSS upscaling, it's also, uh, been used by the UK government for welfare benefit claims, or to make NSFW mods without the original voice actor's consent. Boot, meet mine.

Still, tech companies have been hungry to find the next use case that'll finally catapult us into the future of hi-tech assistants. After all, who doesn't want a little brain in your pocket to chat with? One such company is Humane, who have revealed a very weird magnetic camera-pin-AI assistant thing you can buy for the low low price of… $699. Jeez. 

As reported by Verge, the device clips to the front of your clothes via magnet-slash-battery pack. You can also turn it into a pseudo-smartphone with a monthly $24 subscription via T-Mobile's network. «There are no wake words, so it's not listening, or always recording,» says Imran Chaudhri, co-founder of Humane, in an explanatory video. «It doesn't do anything until you engage with it.»

You can activate it with your voice (Chaudhri doesn't elaborate on how this is different from a «wake word»), making a gesture, touching it, or by a little projector display that shines on your palm which, I hate to admit, is kind of cool in a cute, budget sci-fi sort of way. So what can it do? Yes. 

Or at least, that seems to be the answer Humane wants to market. You can hold food up to it to get probably-accurate information, use it to translate stuff in real time (hopefully without a comic misunderstanding), or ask it to play music. It's a large-language model search engine