How to build a DOA product: Humane AI Pin founders banned internal criticism
Enlarge / The Humane AI Pin.
The Humane AI Pin has launched, crashed, and burned, with founders already looking to sell the company just one month after launch. The New York Times has an article detailing exactly how the company got to the point of launching a dead-on-arrival product and provided a few updates on the sales of the product and the company.
Humane, if you haven't heard, is a company founded by two former Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018. The company raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and, before launch, was valued at $1 billion. The product, the AI Pin, is sort of trying to be a Star Trek communicator. You magnetically clip it onto your shirt and can tap it for voice commands. It has "no apps" (the founders bragged about this feature) and is mostly just a voice assistant box with a touch panel, battery, camera, and speaker/microphone. There's no traditional screen, but a laser projector can shoot a smartwatch-like UI onto your hand that you control with gestures.
The going rate for one of these things is $700, plus a $24 a month subscription, a hard sell in the face of a $400 Apple Watch. It also doesn't really work and was universally panned in reviews, with conclusions ranging from The Verge's "not even close" to Marques Brownlee's "the worst product I've ever reviewed." Apparently, the voice commands are very slow, the battery life is an awful two to four hours, it's heavy and drags down your shirt, and the projector doesn't work well in many lighting conditions. It's also reportedly a fire hazard, with Humane emailing customers this week and telling them to "immediately stop using and charging" the battery case because some units with defective batteries "may pose a fire safety risk."