I spent one whole CES day wearing a small yellow bracelet. To the unsuspecting onlookers nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But all the while, Bee AI's yellow Pioneer wearable was recording everything around me. It doesn't store audio like a regular recording app, but it processes my conversations, then gives me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries. about my live chats.
A few days before the trade show, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which officially launched for the first time today. Guess what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, then have AI disseminate the information to give you useful insights and tasks for your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi's wearable can go around your neck, but it's best to strap it to your forehead near your temples—it has an EEG inside, and Omi claims that if you think specifically about talking to the wearable , the device will understand and be ready to receive your request.
This is the new world we live in, with artificially intelligent wearables constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first appeared on speakers and on our phones, but quickly migrated to our wrists and faces—require at least as much active interaction as a tap or a wake word to activate their eavesdropping ability. But the next wave of hardware assistants, including those coming soon Friends pendantcan passively absorb information and work in the background. They are always listen.
The wearable hardware that leads the field is often cheap—Bee AI's watch is just $50 and Omi's bracelet beads are $89—but the real magic is in the software, often requires registration as it touches multiple devices. Large language model to analyze your chat.
Bee AI
Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. Both previously worked at Squad (Sutin is the founder), a company that enables multimedia screen sharing in video chats so people can watch the same movie or YouTube video together from distant. The company was acquired by X (when it was still called Twitter) and the two briefly joined to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin said he explored the idea of personal AI assistants in 2016, when chatbots were still popular, but the technology was not yet available. That's not the case anymore. The company launched the Bee AI platform last February in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It only started selling Pioneer hardware a little over a week ago. (The name “Bee” captures the idea of ambient computing, as if something were buzzing around and gathering information.) You don't demand the company's hardware to use Bee AI — you can only interact with the AI through the iPhone app — but Zollo says the wearable offers a richer experience because it can record continuously all day. An Android app will launch at the end of the month.
The wearable device is very 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 will should Can also hear both sides. It can be worn as a bracelet on the wrist 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 turn them back on. You can press and hold the button, and users can configure this action to trigger things like handling the current conversation or waking up the AI assistant “Buzz” to ask a question. (There is no speaker on the wearable, so the answer will be spoken through your phone.) When the microphone is muted, there will be a red LED light. While recording, you'd think a green LED would light up, but there's nothing to indicate this wearable is picking up everything around you.