The gadget crafted by the ex-Apple employees which could free us from our smartphones

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” said Steve Jobs, the Apple founder, as he walked on stage to launch the iPhone in 2007. 

Those words might now sound prescient, but initially the iPhone was met with plenty of scepticism. Could Apple really replace the Blackberry’s keyboard or the wildly popular Nokia?

Yet it proved arguably the most successful consumer gadget in history. The design has been the template for billions of smartphones sold around the world – 2.3 billion of them Apple iPhones. 

The modern smartphone – a 6-inch slab of glass and metal with a high-powered camera – has become ubiquitous, even mundane. Billions of us are glued to a handset, thumbs sore from endless scrolling. Genuine concerns around phone or social media addiction have failed to prise us away from the gadget in our pocket – or more typically under our nose.

For the last few years, Silicon Valley has been imagining what might come next. Ben Wood, a technology analyst at CCS Insight who curates the Mobile Phone Museum, says: “We had this huge period of innovation when Steve Jobs walked on stage in January 2007. He came up with what has become the dominant design.”

Now, he says, “everyone is chasing this concept of what comes after the smartphone, which has become boring and formulaic”. Many billions of dollars have been spent researching virtual reality, smart glasses and foldable smartphones – although with few real breakthroughs.

But a surge of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) – driven by the launch of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – has some in the tech sector believing that a post-smartphone age is on the brink of becoming reality. 

Last week, one secretive start-up, California-based Humane, unveiled its “AI Pin”, a kind of cross between a pager, a chatbot and a lapel pin.

The gadget, which will cost $699 in addition to a monthly subscription of $24, clips onto your shirt or jacket and responds to voice queries, such as asking it to play music or make a phone call. Some have compared it to a communicator badge from Star Trek. The company is marketing it as a “standalone” device, meaning you do not need to link it to your phone, freeing users from their screens. 

With no display, it is instead controlled by voice commands, gestures, or by a projector that beams a tiny set of controls onto the palm of your hand. A front-mounted camera can take pictures and videos, while tapping the “pin” activates its voice control functions.

Almost in homage to Apple, the reveal of the AI Pin was suitably Jobsian. In its launch video, husband and wife team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, both former Apple employees, are clad in minimalist black reminiscent of the late Apple founder, while delivering grandiose statements such as: “It is our aim at Humane to build for the world not as it exists today, but as it could be tomorrow.” 

Still, Om Malik, a Silicon Valley based technology writer and investor, lauds the “audacity and magnitude of their idea”. “Humane is proposing another very different idea of personal computing for the post-smartphone era,” he writes.

Like Apple, the AI Pin’s development has been cloaked in secrecy and mystique. The New York Times reports Chaudhri and Bongiorno ran their ideas past a Buddhist Monk, called Brother Spirit, who introduced them to the billionaire Salesforce boss, Marc Benioff, an early investor.

While voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa have been around for years, the AI Pin seeks to build on advances in the technology to provide almost conversational interactions. Neat tricks will include features such as live translation for wearers. Humane also demonstrated more advanced functions – such as having the pin scan a handful of almonds, and returning an estimate of how much protein they contained. 

Despite aping Apple’s minimalist design and slick marketing, not everything has gone smoothly with Humane’s launch. Its AI voice assistant sometimes gets things wrong, giving an incorrect answer in its launch video for the location of the next lunar eclipse.

Still, some in Silicon Valley have welcomed the arrival of Humane as a potential breakthrough that could herald an era beyond smartphones – offering a new kind of interface that relies on voice control and an advanced chatbot. Humane has raised £192m ($240m) for its idea, winning the backing of Sam Altman, the influential co-founder of OpenAI. 

Others have already tried and failed to create an alternative to the iPhone – or at least something that can match its success. Google launched the Google Glass in 2013, smart glasses with a kind of heads-up display, all controlled via voice. They failed to catch on, however, and fans were crudely labelled “glassholes”. 

And since 2020, Meta, the owner of Facebook, has been trying to get consumers to embrace the “metaverse”, a kind of 3D internet accessible via virtual or augmented reality headsets. It has plunged tens of billions of dollars into the effort but the technology is still not widely used. 

Apple itself has spent years working on a set of virtual reality goggles – the Vision Pro – which will go on sale next year, but there is no guarantee it will be as popular as the iPhone, and it is certainly not meant to replace it outright.  

The AI Pin is not the only gadget seeking to capitalise on the hype around AI. Another start-up is developing a wearable necklace, the Rewind Pendant, that records everything the wearer says or hears, transcribing it with AI so users can keep a log of their whole life. 

Some technology experts are not convinced. “Ultimately you have to be completely dependent on a voice interface,” says Wood, of CCS Insight. “Voice is not the panacea everyone thinks it is.”

While voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa are widely used, most people still only use them for extremely simple tasks, such as playing music. 

Getting people to talk to the AI Pin on the go will require a big behaviour change because “it does not come naturally”, says Wood. Paolo Pescatore, founder of technology analyst firm PP Foresight, says the AI Pin will “force [buyers] to learn a new way of using a device they’re not accustomed to”.

Wood sees more promise in advances in smart glasses and augmented reality headsets. Over time, these are expected to get lighter and more powerful, while offering many of the features of a modern smartphone. 

Even then, the phone may be here to stay – with tiny improvements but few revolutionary new features, similar to how televisions have been a household staple for decades. “I am sceptical about this vision of a post-smartphone world,” he says. “The phone in its current form will exist for a very, very long time.”

Six failed iPhone replacements

1. Google Glass

Developed by Google’s X division and launched in 2013, these smart glasses included a heads-up-display and were voice controlled – however wearers were termed “glassholes”. 

2. Amazon Fire Phone

Launched in 2014, this budget phone was built in an attempt to challenge Apple – and let down by a cheap design and dodgy software.

3. Microsoft Lumia

Launched in 2014, Lumia was a line of phones running the alternative Windows Mobile operating system. Microsoft bought Nokia to try and break into mobile, but lost over £6bn ($8bn). 

4. Snapchat Spectacles

Launched in 2016, these augmented reality glasses included a camera that let you record 10 second clips, but cost the company tens of millions of dollars after they failed to sell.

5: Magic Leap One

Developed for nearly a decade, the Magic Leap One cost billions and was launched in 2018. A “mixed reality” headset that failed to sell thanks to a sky high price.

6. Samsung Galaxy Fold

Launched in 2019, this was the first widely available “folding” smartphone. It flopped after its screen was found to break too easily – although later models have had more success.