Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/12/scathing-reviews-of-ai-pin-thats-supposed-to-replace-your-cellphone.html
…
7 Likes
There’s a gizmdo review too…
6 Likes
a good line from that article:
As has been noted so many times by so many journalists and researchers, the AI lies, and it does so with extreme confidence
9 Likes
Make it work like a Star Trek communicator, that’s always safe.
7 Likes
Replace my cellphone…?
No, you really are creating a communication device, like a traditional phone or maybe some Star Trek like AI thingy. My cellphone spends +95% of it’s life showing me video, pictures, and webpages. You are going to need some fancy laser glasses or neural interface to beam that stuff directly into my cortex.
At which point a large majority of the population will endlessly stream garbage dopamine producing content for an obscene amount of hours in a day.
9 Likes
I’m sure those irksome bugs will be ironed out just the second they create a godlike superintellegence 
2 Likes
7 Likes
I don’t understand the desire for exclusively voice-controlled devices, unless perhaps you have a disability that prevents you from interacting with screens. But for the average person, do you want to constantly be telling the world around you every mundane detail of your life? Do you want to be forced to listen to everyone else doing the same? Do you want to be unable to just read information and instead have it slowly read to you by a robot? The idea that this could functionally replace a cell phone, even if it worked perfectly, is absurd. When I ride the bus, 90% of people are quietly using their phones. Somehow I don’t think I could use the bus any more if they were all yelling at their AI pins instead.
12 Likes
So since they actually released a physical device, will it just sublimate into vaporware?
This thing is vapor incarnate, 800 bucks down + subscription just to use and it’s likely got less hardware in it than a flip phone.
2 Likes
I wish I was less scrupulous so I could sell stuff like this without guilt.
2 Likes
I read a comment on this device that said phone use breaks down into two categories: utility and consumption. It’s the consumption side that we struggle with, but every new way of interacting with your phone (or avoiding it) focuses on the utility side.
1 Like
Maybe this is a step towards thought controlled devices. If the first thought-controlled devices are as confusing and confounding as the first voice-controlled devices, we’ll know we’re on the right track. Right? Right? Is this thing on?
1 Like
4 Likes
There are some aspirational/status aspects to the appeal of the voice interface: to a (in retrospect somewhat remarkable) degree the story of modern UIs is one of the sheer power and convenience propelling what was formerly specialist or grunt work surprisingly far up the food chain: you’ve got CEOs typing their own emails; everyone making their own slide decks rather than sending them down to the design department to be made up by specialists and printed as transparencies. ‘low code/no code’ tools promise to allow people to shove together ‘dashboards’ rather than sending the problem off to the code monkeys in Applications to do whatever it is they do.
Voice UIs often don’t deliver on this(on average, your interact with one will be helplessly screaming at a chirpy IVR voice that says “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that” as you try to scrabble toward someone who can solve your problem, rather than an empowering experience); but their implied promise is something of a reaction against powerful-but-menial tools: using voice commands is what someone who has a personal assistant, or who is directing the help, or being the Decision Guy for a room full of subordinates who will go off and execute on it does.
That promise is both often unkept and(for reasons like the ones you describe making it incompatible with the environments people actually live and work in not the stuff of which mass-market success is made); but it provides a subtext of power and status that helps much the way advertisements being made with actors far more attractive than the customers they are targeted at helps.
It may be particularly effective against the sorts of people who matter when trying to get an idea funded(the guys behind this thing raised $230 million; probably not something they could have done by just saying that they were going to make a cellphone, since that’s boring now); or who greenlight internal initiatives: those are the ones who have personal experience with both ordering minions around and with using the powerful-but-same-tech-as-little-people-and-technicians interfaces; which likely makes the promise of tech that can be useful enough to displace the relentlessly practical equipment without the degradation of getting your own hands dirty an easier sell.
3 Likes
… that’s like, all of modern civilization 
5 Likes
It’s made for the person who absolutely does want to be seen and heard talking to their new toy, because it really is all about them.
4 Likes
that made me go read the link:
I thought perhaps the “
\u00e9” thing was a [misprint], but no … the AI Pins pronounce “Beyoncé” as “beeyonk-backslash-you-zero-zero-ee-nine”.
omg!
Would the reviewer need to be electrocuted by the device to rate it lower? “3/10, sent me to the ER with a nasty burn*”? “1/10, it killed my spouse when she tried it”?
( eta: i guess that reveals what they’re doing. one algorithm to do voice recognition which pipes text to another to do the task, and when the task fails, a third algorithm to voice the response. who though never tested – or fixed!? – the text hand-off. just yikes. )
6 Likes
I guess 2 out of 10 is “it doesn’t turn on.” 1 out of 10 would inflict injuries.
It feels like a 4/10 rating for something that mostly doesn’t work, even with its basic functionality, is the reviewer harboring a sneaking suspicion (which is probably entirely unfounded) that maybe the device they’re testing isn’t working because of user error, so they’re hedging.
1 Like
I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription.
I can think of two. Can you imagine Trump and Musk both getting into an argument with their pin
?
2 Likes
