Wearable AI: will it put our smartphones out of fashion?

Facebook parent company Meta, meanwhile, has already put out a pair of AI-powered smart glasses in partnership with Ray-Ban, and Chinese companies TCL and Oppo have followed suit with AI spectacles of their own. They all do much the same thing as the Ai Pin, and are being marketed for the way they connect to an AI chatbot that responds to voice commands.

But why would you want a device that does little more than what your smartphone is already capable of? In part, to free yourself from its less welcome elements. Humane is pitching the Ai Pin as a way of curbing the overuse of smartphones by offering the same essential functions without the addictive apps that keep us compulsively scrolling.

Yet wearable tech has a patchy history. Google tried to popularise the idea of smart glasses back in 2013 with the launch of Google Glass. Although lacking an AI chatbot, it was similarly designed as a smartphone replacement that would provide information to users through a lens display and could respond to voice commands.

The value of that approach will be seen when the R1 launches later this year. Although we can expect similarly experimental devices to follow. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is already reportedly in talks with former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to explore hardware ideas. And a troupe of startups and Silicon Valley heavyweights are now competing to create the chips and processors these new devices will need to power their AI models.