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I passed a healthy day of CES wearing a yellow bracelet. To unsuspecting men nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But all the while, this yellow Pioneer carried by Bee AI recorded everything around me. It wasn’t storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my in-person chats.
A few days before the trade fair, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which was officially presented for the first time today. Guess what he does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then have the AI spread the information to give you actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi’s wearable can go around your neck, but it’s best worn attached to your forehead near your temple — it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you specifically plan to talk to the wearable, the device understands and perk up to receive. your request.
This is the new world we’re in, with artificially intelligent wearables continuously recording the world around us. Voice assistants – which first landed on speakers and on our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces – at least require an active engagement like a tap or a wake word to activate their ability to explain. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes the next Hanging friendit can absorb information passively and work in the background. I am always listening.
The wearable hardware that drives this space is often cheap — Bee’s AI watch is just $50, and Omi’s sticky bead is $89 — but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription since it has to many great language patterns to analyze your conversations.
Bee AI
Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. Both previously worked on Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so that people could remotely watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was acquired by X (when it was called Twitter), and the pair joined for a short time to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin says he explored the idea of a personal AI assistant in 2016 when chatbots were all the rage, but the technology wasn’t there yet. That is no longer the case. The company launched its Bee AI platform last February in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It only started selling its Pioneer hardware a little over a week ago. (The name “Bee” plays with the idea of environmental computing, as if something buzzing around and taking in information.) You don’t have need the company’s hardware to use Bee AI — you can only interact with the AI via the iPhone app — but Zollo says the wearable offers a richer experience, as it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app is on the way at the end of the month.
The wearable is simple. It has two noise-isolating microphones, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a busy environment, the wearable must be able to hear both sides as well. It can be worn as a band on the wrist or clipped to your shirt. There is an “Action” button in the center; pressing once mutes the microphones, and pressing again enables them again. You can press and hold the button, and this action is user-configurable, so they can trigger things like process the current conversation or wake up the AI assistant “Buzz” to ask a question. (There is no speaker on the wearable, so the answers will be spoken through your phone.) When the mic is muted, there is a red LED. When it is recording, you think that the green LED will be lit, but there is nothing to indicate that this wearable takes everything that is around you.
