The resurgence of artificial intelligence has given rise to a new wave of hardware innovation.
The most popular AI Pin has received unprecedented bad reviews. Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) called it the worst product he's ever reviewed; David Pierce, editor of The Verge, said he wouldn't recommend anyone to buy the device.
Its competitor, the Rabbit R1, isn't much better either. The biggest skepticism about this AI device is that Rabbit has come up with a $200 piece of hardware even though it's just an app.
Many people see AI hardware innovation as an opportunity to disrupt the smartphone era and jump into it in an attempt to define a product. However, there is still no question of what AI hardware is in the era of large models.
A year ago, Humane made a splash when she released the AI Pin at TED.
Now there's another AI device at TED. This is the Iyo One from the Iyo company, an AI headset.
Iyo 创始人 Jason Rugolo 在 TED 演讲｜图片来源：TechCrunch
01 Iyo One: It's a headset and an audio computer
In 2021, Insider reported that a team from Google's "moonshot" program was working on a revolutionary hearing device. A few months later, the project, codenamed "Wolverine," was spun off from Google, and project leader Jason Rugolo founded the startup Iyo.
According to publicly available information, Iyo raised a total of $21 million in funding. Alphabet was IYO's first investor. In addition, the list of investors includes Lockheed Martin, a space airline, and SoftBank Vision Fund.
In the official Iyo company's narrative, they refer to the Iyo One as an "audio computer" rather than a headset. Part of the reason is because Iyo does cram a lot of computer components into this 50-cent-sized metal disc, including a CPU with a 4nm process, up to 2GB of RAM, 32GB of flash memory, and modules like batteries, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and more.
相比常规的 TWS 耳机,And One 要大得多|图片来源:Iyo
This means that Iyo can be separated from the phone and become a standalone device, which is an important difference between it and other headsets with integrated AI capabilities.
Imagine you're sitting in a noisy restaurant and can't hear your friends across from you. That's when you put on the Iyo One, which can reduce the noise around you, turn up your friend's voice, and even translate Spain in real time to communicate seamlessly with the other side.
This is the use case of Iyo One that Rugolo portrayed for the audience at the TED conference. To achieve this, Iyo One uses multiple apps such as beamforming, computational auditory scene analysis, machine learning noise reduction, AI transcription, and translation.
It's worth noting, though, that this part of the content isn't presented in real time, but through a video. In other words, whether Iyo One can really achieve the above functions is currently a question mark.
Iyo One does not have a screen, and Iyo has designed a set of audio-based interactive interfaces. Usually when we describe a user interface, we mean a GUI, through which the user interacts with the computer. Iyo One's input and output are completely dependent on natural language. With voice, users can drive AI to assist in reading and sending emails, messages, phone calls, navigation, and music playback.
The Iyo can also be an MR device, but it is auditory rather than visual. Iyo One can create scenes such as a virtual football match or a bustling city street from an auditory perspective. Rugolo calls it Mixed Audio Reality.
Battery life is a key point to pay attention to, after all, if it can't meet the all-weather use, the usability of wearable devices is low. Iyo One is available in both WiFi and cellular versions. According to TechCrunch, when the Iyo One is paired with a phone, it can last up to 16 hours. But when used alone in cellular mode, the battery life plummets to 1.5 hours.
The price of the Iyo One is also worth paying attention to. The $599 price tag for the Wi-Fi version doesn't make it a mass-market consumer product, and the cellular version is $100 more expensive.
The good news is that Iyo doesn't charge for a subscription to AI services like AI Pins do.
02 The Problem of AI Hardware
While no one has finished defining AI hardware, there are at least some guidelines to follow, such as using smartphones as anchors.
Never before in human history has technology penetrated into human life as deeply as smartphones, from clothing, food, housing and transportation to consumption and production, smartphones have participated in almost every link of human society.
If replacing smartphones is the end point for AI hardware, this is clearly 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 devices are more accessible and interact more with the environment (more sensors). Still, PCs aren't completely gone, and heavy work still needs to be done on PCs.
For quite some time to come, AI hardware will coexist with smartphones. At this time, we need to think: what problem can AI hardware solve that smartphones can't solve?
The failure of AI Pin lies in the poor user experience, including heat generation, poor battery life, poor projection display, slow AI feedback, and so on. The poor user experience reflects the problem of product definition. AI Pin innovated product interaction, but it didn't simplify the old mobile phone interaction. There is no logic in trying to replace the original one with a more cumbersome set of interactions.
From this, some characteristics of AI hardware can be summarized:
- It is a lighter device than a mobile phone;
- It should be more accessible and interact more with the environment than a mobile phone;
- It should solve the problem that the phone can't solve, not do the features that the phone has already done well;
At this time, we don't know how the Iyo One will perform. However, judging from the above characteristics, it is clear that the Iyo One is more suitable for the concept of AI hardware than the AI Pin.
In fact, there have been some success stories in the market. FOR EXAMPLE, OLAUD NOTE, AN AI VOICE RECORDER THAT CAN BE ATTACHED TO MOBILE PHONES, SURPASSED $10 MILLION IN SALES IN APRIL THIS YEAR. and the second-generation smart glasses launched by Meta and Ray-Ban in collaboration, which sold more than 200,000 pairs in Q4 alone.
For AI hardware, being able to replace mobile phones is certainly a success. Rugolo doesn't have that much ambition, and according to tech outlet AXIOS, being able to sell tens of thousands of units is already a success for him.
After all, this means that the company's product solves the problem and someone pays for it.
*Header image source: Iyo
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