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I spent AROUND day at CES wearing a small yellow bracelet. To unsuspecting people nearby, it might look like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI was recording everything around me. It doesn’t save audio like a typical recorder app, but it processes my conversations, then gives me personal to-do lists and readable summaries of my personal chats.
A few days before the trade show, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which officially opened for the first time today. I wonder what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then have AI disseminate 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 on your forehead near your temple—it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi says that if you specifically think about talking to the wearable -ob, the device understands and advances to receive. your request.
This is the new world we are entering, with artificially intelligent wearables that continuously record the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed on speakers and our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—require at least some active interaction like a tap or a wake word to activate the their ability to eavesdrop. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes the future Friend pendantcan absorb information passively and work in the background. They are always listening.
The wearable hardware leading this space is often cheap—Bee’s AI watch is just $50, and Omi’s stick-on bead is $89—but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription while it taps a lot major language models to analyze your conversations.
Bee AI
Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. The two previously worked on Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was acquired by X (it was then called Twitter), and the pair both joined briefly to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin said he explored the idea of an AI personal assistant in 2016 when chatbots were all the rage, but the technology wasn’t there yet. Not like that anymore. The company launched the Bee AI platform in February in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It just started selling its Pioneer hardware just over a week ago. (The “Bee” name plays on the idea of ambient computing, as if something is buzzing and gathering information.) You don’t NEED The company’s hardware will use Bee AI—you can only interact with the AI through an iPhone app—but Zollo says the wearable offers a richer experience because it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app is on the way by the end of the month.
The wearable is simple. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a busy environment, the wearable NEED also hear both parties. It can be worn as a wrist band or clipped to your shirt. There is an “Action” button in the middle; Pressing it once will mute the microphones, and pressing it again will unmute them. You can press and hold the button, and this action can be configured by the user, so it can trigger things like processing the current conversation or waking the “Buzz” AI assistant to ask it. (There’s no speaker on the wearable, so answers are spoken through your phone.) When the microphone is muted, there’s a red LED. When it’s recording, you’d think the green LED would light up, but there’s nothing to indicate that this wearable is capturing everything around you.
