PSA: Please Do Not Buy This Dubious ‘AI Translator’

Say the words “Ai Pin†to any tech geek within earshot, and they’ll most likely regale you with tales of AI gadget infamy. The Humane wearable was (past tense) nothing short of a disaster. Not only was the pin an eye-watering $700 when it was released, but it also required a $24 monthly subscription for LTE. To top it all off, it, uh… barely did anything that its founders promised.

The state of AI gadgets since the rise and fall of the Ai Pin hasn’t gotten much better. While Humane has been unceremoniously junked and sold off to HP, similar names in the AI gadget space, like Rabbit, which makes the R1, have been shouting into an audience-less void. If an AI gadget falls in the forest and there’s no one there to misguidedly buy it, does it really kill the smartphone? The answer? Unequivocally no.

And yes, Sam Altman and Jony Ive are readying themselves for a stab at the ol’ AI lottery, but as far as we know, they can’t quite seem to figure out how to get their AI computer to, well… compute. With OpenAI money.

That’s a lot of bad stuff, but what if I told you that no matter how bad things are in the world of AI gadgets, there are entrants in this faltering field that are far, far worse? So bad, in fact, that they make Humane and its defunct Ai Pin look like the second coming of the iPhone. You’d probably believe me. And you should, not just because of past disasters, but because of what I’m about to tell you.

How do you say “total bullshit†in 130 different languages?

Every once in a while, as a tech reviewer, you run into some red flags—signs that a gadget or a service might not be everything it’s cracked up to be. Those warnings can come in many flavors, like a company kicking the can down the road by promising refined functionality at an unspecified future date, or one that fails to nail the basics right out of the gate.

These things happen; sometimes a product does improve, but other times companies (especially new ones) struggle to fully iron things out. This is just the way of the consumer tech world, and it’s our job as part of Gizmodo’s consumer tech team to review these gadgets as we find them, no matter what their state may be.

Sometimes, though, those aforementioned red flags are so red and so voluminous that I have no choice but to give you, dear reader, a different kind of recommendation, and in the case of InnAIO’s T10, that would be a simple and direct one: run in the other direction.

Let me start by saying we were asked by a representative for InnAIO, an AI hardware company out of China, not to write this review. Here’s what a communications rep for InnAIO wrote to Gizmodo in an email after I inquired about issues with the device:

Regarding the product review, if your experience isn’t positive, we completely understand and kindly ask that it not be published. Thank you for your time and understanding.

A representative also added that they’ve “paused collaboration with InnAIO for now.â€

As you may have gathered, I am totally, 100% writing this review anyway, and here’s why: this thing might actually be total bullshit. Let’s start from the top.

The T10 is a series of red flags

The $190 InnAIO T10 is (allegedly) a magnetic puck that attaches to your phone and is capable of translating other languages. To start a translation, you simply press the button on the puck to initiate a recording, pull open an app, and then speak or have someone else speak. The translated text will both appear in text form on the app and also be played out loud via your phone in the language of your choosing.

Yes, I just described pretty much every AI translator, but there’s a fun twist to the T10, which is that the puck also has a feature that deepfakes your voice, allowing you to play translated speech in a tone similar to yours. If that sounds oddly familiar to a feature launched on Google’s Pixel 10 this year, that’s because it’s basically the same thing.

The thing about the T10 is that it actually appears to work—at least on the surface. The speech I translated, both in the live translation feature and one-offs, came out correct, and the voice cloning feature did an alright job of mimicking my voice and the voices of other people in my office. So everything is gravy, right? There’s just one problem, and that’s the fact that I’m not sure the T10 is actually doing anything at all.

There are obviously plenty of devices that you need to connect to your phone to use properly, but in the case of the T10, this caveat feels extra strange. While InnAIO claims to be using a combination of OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Meta’s Llama models to translate, it does not say anywhere on its site that the processing is happening on the device. And because you cannot effectively use the T10 in any sort of standalone capacity—you can’t even use it without having the app open—there is no way to verify what the puck is doing.

Obviously, I could answer this question by simply asking InnAIO what the device does and doesn’t do, which is exactly what I did. Here’s the response I got from a third-party representative for the company: “As the product isn’t fully ready and needs further improvements, we’ve paused collaboration with InnAIO for now.â€

A second representative offered a little clarification on this front, but not much.

“Its primary strength lies in enabling cross-application translation, which is initiated directly through the device and works seamlessly with its supported app,†they told Gizmodo, though they did not explicitly state that any processing is happening on-device, only that translation is “initiated†by the T10.

Not exactly the answer I was looking for, and unfortunately, the weird quirks don’t stop there.

Not what I meant when I said “mic dropâ€

I was highly skeptical that the T10 has a microphone and it turns out I was right.

One thing that I noticed is that the device only picks up voices if my phone is nearby. If I hold down the button for the puck and walk away from my phone (still in Bluetooth range, mind you), it can’t hear a single word that I say. If I speak directly into my phone, however, it picks the whole thing up.

I even tried moving my phone and the T10 close together and speaking into the device while my phone’s microphone was covered up, because maybe the Bluetooth is just really bad, right? Wrong. The only time the puck seemed to hear me was when I uncovered my phone mic. As a final test, I revoked the T10’s mic permissions in iOS and tried to use the puck to translate, but was met with a pop-up in the app stating that I needed to turn mic permissions back on in order to use any features. Hmm.

The T10, according to a representative for InnAIO doesn’t even have a microphone. The odd part is that, in marketing materials, InnAIO shows the T10 resting on the table between speakers as though it were positioned in an ideal place to capture everyone’s words with a microphone. Promotional images also show people holding the device to their mouths as though they should be speaking directly into it.

So, to recap, the company is selling a $190 “AI translator†that may not even do what’s advertised, and hasn’t paused sales. If your alarms aren’t going off, they really should. A representative told me that there are plans to expand the offline capabilities of the T10, but that update has yet to materialize.

“An update rolling out at the end of December will expand offline translation capabilities, allowing users to translate directly within the app even when an internet connection is unavailable,†said a representative.

Seriously, what the puck?

Okay, so what have we (kind of) established? One: I cannot verify if any processing is happening on-device. The T10 does not work without an app or internet connection via your phone’s Bluetooth, and it does not state anywhere how or when computing is done. Yes, the translation works, but that’s only  through an app, which could be processing via the cloud. InnAIO has stopped short of saying explicitly that processing is happening on-device.

Two: The T10 cannot actually hear anything you say. As I explained before, my hunch about the lack of mic turned out to be true, which means that the T10 is completely reliant on your phone for the whole hearing part and pretty much everything else.

Three: Messaging about what the T10 actually does has been confusing at best and misleading at the worst.

While AI translators are a thing that exists, others offer standalone capabilities. Timekettle’s X1 AI Interpreter, for example, can be used offline, which is a pretty big indicator that it’s doing something. There’s also the fact that Timkettle’s device is notably much bigger than the T10, which is another red flag.

The fact is, I cannot in good faith tell you that this isn’t just a $190 button that activates an app on your phone. Even Plaud, however you feel about AI recorders, has a microphone on it that can record things independently and send them to the cloud for transcriptions. Is it silly? Yes. But it’s something. And I don’t even want to think this way. I’d like to believe you could take AI gadgets at face value, and if InnAIO is out here suggesting they’re offering a way to run on-device translation in a tiny little puck, then that’s what they’re doing.

But we’ve seen the pantheon of bad AI, and with that context, all I’m left with is wondering if this tiny little expensive puck even has a f*cking mic (it doesn’t). I’ll let you make your own decision on the T10, but for now, I would leave you with one recommendation if you need to translate something in a pinch. Pick up your phone and use Google Translate.