An ex-Apple designer showed off a futuristic AI device that projects phone calls onto your hand

• A new device by Humane can project phone calls onto the palm of a hand.
• The AI-oriented startup was founded by Apple alums Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno.

Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri has a vision for an artificially intelligent future where devices have a subtler presence in the form of wearables, and screens are optional.

At the 2023 annual TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, Chaudhri appeared to show the power of such a tool, taking a call in a rather unusual way in the middle of his presentation on Thursday.

Zarif Ali, a Toronto-based freelance journalist, tweeted a visual of the demo in which Chaudhri, who formerly led design at Apple, appeared to view a call notification in the palm of his hand. The demo was first reported by Axios.

In a video of the event that Ali shared with Insider, Chaudhri's talk appeared to be interrupted by the insistent chime of a call. But instead of reaching for a device in his pocket, Chaudhri simply turned over his hand to gaze at his palm.

"Sorry, this is my wife," he said, looking over at an alert lighting up on his palm about the call. "I'm going to have to get this." Chaudhri proceeds to take the call from wife and Humane co-founder and fellow Apple alum Bethany Bongiorno.

"We believe that artificial intelligence or AI would be the driving force behind the next leap in device design," he said in the presentation.

A representative for TED indicated that the video that Ali shared was likely captured from a livestream. The representative did not share when a video of the demonstration would be available for public viewing.

"Humane will be releasing further details on how the device works in the coming months," a company spokesperson told Insider. Chaudhri and Bongiorno did not respond to Insider's messages seeking comment ahead of publication.

At the event, Chaudhri also appeared to demonstrate the device's ability to act as an assistant. At one point, he asked the device where he could buy his wife a gift before leaving town, which prompted the device to provide a simple response about a popular shopping district in Vancouver, according to the video Ali shared that Insider viewed.

Chaudhri also showed the device's ability to quickly produce a French translation of a sentence he spoke into it, repeated in an AI-generated voice similar to his own: "Invisible devices should feel so natural to use that you almost forget about their existence."

Humane disclosed in March that it raised a $100 million series C funding round led by Kindred Ventures, and in which OpenAI's founder Sam Altman, whose star has risen since the runaway success of ChatGPT, was one of the other investors.