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Concentration is a virtue at all times.

Author | Tang Yitao
edit| Jingyu

The resurgence of artificial intelligence has spawned a new wave of hardware innovation.

Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) called it the worst product he had ever reviewed, and The Verge editor David Pierce said he would not recommend anyone buy the device.

Its competitor, Rabbit R1, is not much better. The biggest question about this AI device is that it is just an app.

Many people see AI hardware innovation as an opportunity to disrupt the smartphone era and have invested in it to try to define the product. However, there is still no consensus on "what is AI hardware in the era of big models".

A year ago, Humane released AI Pin at the TED conference, which caused a sensation.

Now, yet another AI device has made its debut at the TED conference.This is Iyo One, an AI headset from Iyo.。

Iyo founder Jason Rugolo speaks at TED | Image source: TechCrunch

01

Iyo One: It is a headset.

Audio Computer

In 2021, Insider reported that a team at Google's "Moonshot Project" was developing a revolutionary hearing device. A few months later, the project, code-named "Wolverine," was spun off from Google, and project leader Jason Rugolo founded the startup Iyo.

According to public information, Iyo has raised a total of $21 million. Alphabet is Iyo's first investor. In addition, the list of investors also includes aerospace company Lockheed Martin and SoftBank Vision Fund.

In Iyo's official narrative, they call Iyo One an "audio computer" rather than a headset. Part of the reason is that Iyo has indeed stuffed many computer components into this 50-cent-sized metal disc, including a 4nm CPU, up to 2GB of memory, 32GB of flash memory, as well as batteries, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and other modules.

Compared to regular TWS headphones, Iyo One is much larger | Image source: Iyo

This means that Iyo can be separated from the phone and become an independent device, which is an important difference between it and other headphones with integrated AI functions.。

Imagine you are sitting in a noisy restaurant and can't hear your friend across from you. At this time, you put on Iyo One, which can reduce the surrounding noise, increase the voice of your friend, and even provide real-time Spanish translation, so that you can communicate seamlessly with the other party.

This is the usage scenario of Iyo One that Rugolo described to the audience at the TED conference. To achieve this effect, Iyo One uses multiple apps such as beamforming, computational auditory scene analysis, machine learning noise reduction, and AI transcription and translation.

However, it is worth noting that this part of the content is not a real-time demonstration, but a video presentation. In other words, whether Iyo One can really achieve the above functions is still a question mark.

Iyo One has no screen. Iyo has designed a special audio-based interactive interface. Usually when we describe the user interface, we refer to the GUI, which is used by users to interact with computers.Iyo One's input and output rely entirely on natural language. Through voice, users can drive AI to assist in reading and sending emails, messages, calls, navigation, and music playback.

Iyo can also be a MR device, but it is auditory rather than visual. Iyo One can build a virtual football game or a busy city street for you from an auditory perspective. Rugolo calls it Mixed Audio Reality.

Battery life is a key point worth paying attention to. After all, if it cannot meet all-day use, the usability of wearable devices will be very low. Iyo One is divided into WiFi version and cellular version. According to TechCrunch, when Iyo One is paired with a mobile phone, the battery life can reach 16 hours. However, when used independently in cellular mode, the battery life will drop sharply to 1.5 hours.

The price of the Iyo One is also worth noting. At $599 for the Wi-Fi version, it's not a mass-market consumer product, and the cellular version is $100 more.

The good news is that Iyo doesn’t charge a subscription fee for its AI service like AI Pin does.

02

The AI ​​Hardware Challenge

Although no one has yet completed the product definition of AI hardware, there are at least some guidelines to follow, such as using smartphones as anchors.

Never in human history has any technology penetrated so deeply into human life as smartphones. From food, clothing, housing and transportation to consumption and production, smartphones are involved in almost every aspect of human society.

If replacing smartphones is the end point of AI hardware, this is obviously not a goal that can be achieved in a short period of time. From the PC era to the smartphone era, the significant change is that the devices are more accessible and interact more with the environment (more sensors). Despite this, PCs have not completely disappeared, and heavy work still needs to be done on PCs.

For quite a long time, AI hardware will coexist with smartphones. At this time, we need to think: what problems can AI hardware solve that smartphones cannot?

The failure of AI Pin lies in the poor user experience, including heating, poor battery life, poor projection display, slow AI feedback, etc. The poor user experience reflects the problem of product definition. AI Pin has innovated product interaction, but it has not simplified the old mobile phone interaction.There is no logic in trying to replace the original interaction with a more complicated set of interactions。

This can summarize some characteristics of AI hardware：

• It is a device that is lighter than a mobile phone;

• It should be more accessible and more interactive with the environment than a mobile phone;

• It should solve problems that mobile phones cannot solve, rather than do functions that mobile phones already do well;

We currently have no idea how the real Iyo One performs. But judging from the above features, Iyo One is obviously more in line with the concept of AI hardware than AI Pin.

In fact, there are already some successful cases in the market. For example, the AI ​​recorder OLAUD NOTE that can be attached to a mobile phone exceeded $10 million in sales in April this year. And the second-generation smart glasses jointly launched by Meta and Ray-Ban sold more than 300,000 pairs in Q4 of 2023 alone.

For AI hardware, being able to replace mobile phones is of course a success. Rugolo does not have such big ambitions. According to technology media Axios, for him, being able to sell tens of thousands of products is already a success.

After all, it means that the company's product solves a problem and someone is paying for it.

*Header image source: Iyo

This article is an original article from Geek Park. For reprinting, please contact Geek Jun on WeChat: geekparkGO

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