Humane is a mysterious wearable AI camera startup that's raised $230M

A company by the name of Humane, founded by husband and wife team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, both former Apple executives, has raised $230,000,000. This figure is after the Series C round of fundraising that added $100m to its existing kitty. It’s a somewhat secretive company but their goal seems to be to bring to market wearable AI cameras. But beyond that, there aren’t really many details, save for a few blurry screenshots.

What is clear is that Humane has teamed up with Microsoft and OpenAI to leverage human AI experiences at a large scale. The company says they are also working with LG to develop potential R&D projects for future Humane products and their core technology. Exactly what it will offer, though, is still pretty unclear. Both figuratively and literally, from looking at the screenshots.

According to a press release on the Humane website, the company’s goal is to create a “first-of-its-kind software platform and consumer device built from the ground up for artificial intelligence”. Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri says, “our first device will enable people to bring AI with them everywhere”. The press release doesn’t really get any less vague than that.

A number of screenshots do reveal some information about the device, though. Like the fact that it’s going to either include or primarily be a camera. From what we can make out in the screenshots, though, it looks like their plan is to try and replace the smartphones we currently use on a daily basis for many tasks.

No specs are revealed about the camera itself, except that it features LiDAR. It will shoot both photos and videos, the latter of which are stored on a remote server for processing time, compression and to free up space on the device itself. It will also feature some kind of gesture control, although how that might work in a camera you’re wearing, I’m not sure. After all, if it’s looking in front of you, it’s not seeing you.

As a camera, it captures moments you didn’t think to capture. Moments you want to recall, you can mark them by tapping record and those moments will be cued to be processed on the server so you can recall them in different styles, either as images or videos.

Images and videos could be authored in various styles of filmmaking, documentary, lifestyle, candid, photojournalism, sport, street, landscape, etc. All AI assisted image processing is done server side. All colour graded, stabilised, cropped perfectly to the moment you want to relive.

You can always turn the camera off manually. The camera is off when being worn.

On the platform section, it does mention “personal live broadcasting”, noting Instagram and Snapchat. No mention of perhaps more useful/popular platforms like YouTube and TikTok. It also lists a series of questions you might want to ask it to keep up on your general daily life, similar to how we work today with Siri, Alexa or Google – but more advanced.

Going beyond communication, fitness, activity and digital assistance, the CMR will take over micro transactions that once required a smartphone and are now even simpler, faster and more fluid with the aid of sight-assisted context awareness. Where is… Which way… What is… When is…

Hybrid camera and LiDAR/TOF data streams allow for accurate and natural gestures to achieve quick responses to questions. What kind of car is that? What is that building? Will this fit my wife? How much did I eat today? How much is this on Amazon? Put this on my wish list.

Camera stream can be made available to apps to enable boundless experiences like:

Personal life broadcasting: Instagram life, Snapchat

Senior monitoring: How’s my mum doing today? (has she had her medicine, has she been active)

Memory recall: Show me my daughter’s goal from last week

Mediation: AI-enabled personal guided mediation that knows you’re in your office and guides you to look through your window, etc.

From the description above, not only does it look like it’s taking on smartphones, but smartwatches, too. Wired interviewed Humane’s co-founders to find out a little more, but in the almost-21-minute interview, very little is actually revealed about what we can expect.