Humane's Pin - Gesture interactions and NUI

We are living and designing in amazing times - and that's why it took me some time straighten up my thoughts 😉 - I came aware of Humane's Pin.
The way I see it is that Humane like to run their Pin or position their AI Pin more as a counterpart than an alternative to smartphones and smartwatches, letting us live in the moment, in the present rather than staring at a screen and tearing us out of the context.

The renaissance of gesture interactions and NUI

Watching what the new pin of Humane Inc gives us at hand - in the truest sense of the word - is great.
And curiously I will follow - as I did with the HUD (head up displays)  and other touchless devices.

What Humane is trying to do with the Pin is essentially strip away interface barriers from your technology. UX has many responsibilities - but one is for sure removing barriers to access – why user experience needs to be higher on the agenda of everyone and especially companies and services.

Humane's Pin doesn't have a start-screen or other kind intro barrier - it is just that you can just talk to or touch the Pin, say what you want to do or know, and it’ll happen single-handed, just by doing, by gesture or by voice. It is close what we thought about one or even two decades ago when we designed or envisioned Natural User Interfaces (NUI) - user interfaces and interactions using modalities such as touch, gestures or voice.

Over the last year, we’ve seen a huge amount of functionality become available through a simple text command to a chatbot; and we will so many more in the future - thx to KI, AI, ML and DL.

UX is super important from my point of view

As whatever we do, design, plan must match the user’s skill level and use context, we’ll find - given the technology we have - designing and implementing interfaces that feel useful, helpful, supportive or natural to all users will be a very difficult task - and I see us as UX people responsible for it. So, rather than try to design 'something' that are natural / useful / usable for all users, we should focus any things and approaches we design on and for specific users and contexts.

Good design, good services, apps .. u name it ... should fit the individual user and its use context if they’re going to feel good and easy to use to someone. 

Back to Humane's Pin 

I am super curious to see what this thing can actually do. Most of the features Humane Inc mentions in its announcement of 10mins ... Humane launches AI Pin (full presentation)

are the ones which Imran Chaudhri, one of the co-founders, showed during a demo at TED earlier this year: The Disappearing Computer — and a World Where You Can Take AI Everywhere | Imran Chaudhri | TED