I spent the entire day of CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. To the unsuspecting, it might look like a fitness tracker. But all the while, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI is recording everything around me. It doesn’t save audio like a typical recorder app, but it processes my conversations, and then gives me a personal to-do list and a readable summary of my private conversations. A few days before the trade fair, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which officially opened for the first time today. Guess what he did? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then AI distributes that information to give you insights and tasks you can take from your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi’s wearable can go around your neck, but it’s best to wear it on your forehead near your temple – there’s an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you think specifically about talking to the wearable, the device will understand and benefit from it. your request. This is a new world we’re living in, with artificial wearables constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which initially landed on speakers and on phones, but quickly moved to wrists and faces—at least require active engagement like taps or wake-up words to activate the ability to hear. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes the upcoming Friend pendant, can absorb information passively and work in the background. They always listen. The wearable hardware in this space is often cheap—a Bee AI watch is just $50, and an Omi bead is $89—but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription for its variety. a large language model to analyze your conversations.Bee AIBee The yellow wearable AI listens to your interactions, then provides a transcript of the text in the mobile app. Photo: Tristan deBrauwereBee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. Both previously worked at Squad (Sutin is the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was bought by X (back when it was called Twitter), and the pair teamed up briefly to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo has previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok. That’s not the case anymore. The company launched its Bee AI platform last February in beta, with the community actively providing feedback. Just started selling Pioneer hardware over a week ago. (The name “Bee” plays with the idea of ambient computing, as if something is hovering around and picking up information.) You don’t need enterprise hardware to use Bee AI—you can just interact with the AI through an iPhone app—but Zollo says the wearable offers a rich experience. because it can continuously record all day. An Android app is on the way by the end of the month. Wearables are simple. It has two microphones for sound isolation, and Sutin said that if you can hear the person you are talking to in a busy environment, the wearable should be able to hear both parties as well. It can be worn as a band around the waist or cut into a shirt. There is an “Action” button in the middle; pressing once mutes the mics, and pressing again enables it again. You can press and hold a button, and this action is user-configurable, so it can trigger things like processing the current conversation or waking up the AI assistant “Buzz” to ask a question. (There is no speaker in the wearable, so the answer will be spoken over the phone.) When the mic is turned off, there is a red LED. When you’re recording, you’d think the green LED would light up, but there’s nothing to indicate that this wearable is capturing everything around you.
