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Cailianshe News, August 8 (Editor: Shi Zhengcheng)As one of the first hardware products to become popular in the AI ​​era, the AI ​​Pin, a concept interactive hardware launched by the US startup Humane, is now in a more difficult situation than being unsalable.Since May this year, the number of returned products received by the company has continued to exceed new sales orders.

You should know that this product only started to be shipped to the public in mid-April.

"A flood of bad reviews"

First, let’s take a quick look at what AI Pin is. This wearable “ambient and contextual computing” device includes a camera, a laser projector, a microphone, and a pressable touchpad. The main interaction methods include:Voice, touch and laser projection (to the user's hand)。

(This hardware looks like this, source: company website)

(Interactive method, source: demonstration video)

Since the founding couple Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno both worked for Apple for a long time, and Humane's investors include top industry figures such as Altman and Microsoft, the product attracted strong attention from the global technology circle after its release in November last year.

Half a year later, Humane confidently finished stocking its products and sent evaluation machines to a number of media outlets, which received highly consistent reviews.“Don’t buy it!”。

The more polite major media, such as the New York Times and The Verge, all saidThe product is very novel, but "it is absolutely impossible to recommend consumers to buy such a product"Marques Brownlee, a technology blogger with tens of millions of followers, said bluntly,This is the worst product he has ever reviewed.”。

The problems pointed out by these reviews include: the machine is prone to overheating and shutting down, especially when using a laser projector; the laser projection is not clear in daylight; there is no viewfinder, so the user has no idea what the camera is capturing; and the use cases of the AI ​​behind the machine (such as Google Gemini) itself are also limited.

Even more deadly,This product is priced at $699, and users have to pay an additional $24 per month for data usage and AI model usage fees.

Returns > New Orders

It is not difficult to understand why few consumers were interested in this product after reading the initial batch of media reviews.

Technology media The Verge reported thatSo far, shipments of the AI ​​Pin and accessories have been around 10,000 units, well below the company's original expectation of selling 100,000 units in the first year on the market.

And the return problem is also exacerbating Humane's predicament. According to internal data obtained by the media, after the launch in April, the number of returns from May to August was more than the number of new orders. In addition to the 1,000 orders that were canceled before delivery, there were about 8,000 AI Pins left on the market in June, and the latest data has dropped to 7,000.

Compared with the $200 million invested by Altman, Microsoft and others, the sales of less than $10 million are particularly eye-catching, and this is not the only problem.

Due to restrictions from our telecom partner T-Mobile,Once a user returns a product, Humane cannot refurbish it, nor can it resell it.However, people familiar with the matter said that he did not believe that the company would directly throw away these products as garbage, but hoped to solve the problem by cooperating with operators.

In response to the latest reports, Humane spokesperson Zoz Cuccias said the numbers were "inaccurate" but declined to provide specific details. Cuccias further stated,The company is aware that “we are at the starting line, not the finish line”, the company has released several software updates in response to "user feedback" since the product came to market.

On the day when the bad reviews swept the Internet, the company's co-founder Bongiorno also responded on social media that AI Pin is not to replace mobile phones, but a path to ambient computing. There has never been a perfect first-generation product, and this product is not the company's complete vision.

Personnel shake-up continues

As the new product received poor reviews, Humane's leadership structure has also undergone major changes in the past few months.

According to incomplete statistics, the company's director of customer experience Tori Geiken quietly quit the company's collaborative office platform last week. The company's former vice president Jeremy Werner, former chief technology officer Patrick Gates, and product engineering director Ken Kocienda have also left the company.

Of course, there are new people joining the team. Rubén Caballero, who served as vice president of engineering at Apple and Microsoft, joined Humane in June this year as chief engineering and strategy officer.