I spent a All day at CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. To unsuspecting humans nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Bee AI Pioneer wearable device recorded everything around me. It didn’t store audio like a typical recording app, but it processed my conversations and then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my in-person chats.
A few days before the show, I spoke with the founder of another startup, Omi, which was officially launched for the first time today. Guess what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log and then have AI disseminate the information to give you insights and actionable tasks for your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi’s wearable device can be worn around the neck, but is best worn against the forehead near the temple; It has an EEG inside and Omi claims that if you specifically think about talking to the wearable device, the device will understand and perk up to receive. your request.
This is the new world we are in, with wearable devices with artificial intelligence that continuously record the world around us. Voice assistants, which first came to speakers and our phones but quickly moved to our wrists and faces, at least required active participation, such as a touch or a wake word, to activate their eavesdropping capabilities. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes the upcoming Friend pendant, can passively absorb information and work in the background. they are always listening.
The wearable hardware leading this space is typically cheap (Bee AI’s watch is just $50 and the Omi Sticky Account is $89), but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription as it takes advantage multiple large language models to analyze. your conversations.
Bee AI
Bee AI was founded by María de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. The two previously worked on Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled multimedia screen sharing in video chats so people could remotely watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was acquired by X (when it was called Twitter), and the two teamed up briefly to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin says he explored the idea of an AI personal assistant in 2016, when chatbots were all the rage but the technology wasn’t yet available. That is no longer the case. The company launched its Bee AI platform last February in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It just started selling its Pioneer hardware a little over a week ago. (The name “Bee” plays on the idea of ambient computing, as if something were buzzing around and absorbing information.) need The company’s hardware uses Bee AI (you can interact with the AI through the iPhone app), but Zollo says the wearable device offers a richer experience since it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app will be on the way at the end of the month.
The wearable is simple. It has two microphones to isolate noise and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a busy environment, the wearable device ought being able to listen to both sides as well. It can be worn as a bracelet on the wrist or attached to your shirt. There is an “Action” button in the center; Pressing it once mutes the microphones and pressing it again enables them again. You can press and hold the button, and this action is user-configurable, so you can trigger things like processing the current conversation or waking up the AI assistant “Buzz” to ask it a question. (There is no speaker on the handheld device, so answers will be spoken through your phone.) When the microphone is muted, there is a red LED. When it’s recording, you’d think the green LED would be on, but there’s nothing to indicate that this portable device is picking up everything around you.