An Ex-Apple designer and Humane founder, Imran Chaudhri, showcased the power of a tool on Thursday at the 2023 annual TED conference in Vancouver, Canada.
He did this by taking a call in an unexpected method in the middle of his presentation.
A clip of the event was shared by an independent journalist based in Toronto, Zarif Ali, in which Chaudhri, who previously directed design at Apple, was captured to be viewing a call notice in the palm of his hand. Axios was the first to report on the demo.
Chaudhri’s speech appeared to be interrupted by an incessant ringing of a call in a video of the occasion that Ali shared with Insider. Rather of going for a device in his pocket, Chaudhri merely turned his hand over to examine his palm.
“Sorry, this is my wife,” he remarked, gazing over at a call alert light on his palm. “I’m going to have to get this.” Chaudhri then answers the phone from his wife, Humane co-founder and fellow Apple alum Bethany Bongiorno.
“We believe that artificial intelligence, or AI,” he stated in the presentation, “will be the driving force behind the next leap in device design.”
According to a TED representative, the footage Ali provided was most likely captured from a livestream.
The spokesman did not say when a video of the protest would be made accessible to the public.
“Humane will be releasing further details on how the device works in the coming months,” a company spokesperson told Insider.
Chaudhri also attended at the event to demonstrate the device’s potential to function as an assistant.
According to the video Ali provided with Insider, he asked the gadget where he could purchase his wife a gift before leaving town, which prompted the device to deliver a straightforward response about a popular shopping district in Vancouver.
Chaudhri also demonstrated the device’s capacity to swiftly translate a line he whispered into it into French, which was then repeated in an AI-generated voice identical to his own: “Invisible devices should feel so natural to use that you almost forget about their existence.”
Humane announced in March that it has raised a $100 million series C fundraising round led by Kindred Ventures, with OpenAI’s creator participating.