Thursday, January 9, 2025

Your next AI wearable will listen to everything all the time

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I spent wearing a little yellow bracelet all day at CES. To unsuspecting people nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But all the while, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI was recording everything around me. It didn’t store audio like a typical recording app, but it processed my calls and then provided me with personalized to-do lists and easy-to-read summaries of my personal conversations.

A few days before the fair, I talked to the founder of another up-to-date company, Omi, which was officially presented for the first time today. Guess what this does? Record everything around you to create an activity diary, then ask the AI ​​to disseminate the information to provide you with actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant. The Omi device can be worn around the neck, but it’s best to wear it taped to your forehead near your temples — it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi says that if you think specifically about talking to the wearable, the device will understand and come to life to answer your request.

This is the up-to-date world we live in, where artificial sharp wearable devices are constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants – which first appeared on speakers and our phones but quickly moved to our wrists and faces – required at least energetic input, such as a tap or wake-up word, to activate their eavesdropping ability. However, the next wave of hardware assistants, which includes the upcoming Friend Pendant, can passively absorb information and run in the background. Are I always listen.

The wearables that lead in this space are often economical – the Bee AI watch costs just $50 and the Omi stick-on bead costs $89 – but the real magic lies in the software, which often requires a subscription because it uses many huge language models your conversations.

AI Bee

The yellow Bee AI wearable listens to your interactions and then provides text transcripts to the mobile app.

Photo: Tristan deBrauwere

Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. The two previously worked at Squad (founded by Sutin), which enabled media screen sharing during 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 two joined briefly to work at Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.

Sutin says he toyed with the idea of ​​an AI personal assistant in 2016, when chatbots were all the rage, but the technology didn’t exist yet. This is no longer the case. The company launched its Bee AI platform in February last year in beta, with an energetic community providing feedback. Pioneer started selling equipment just over a week ago. (The name “Bee” refers to the idea of ​​processing the environment, as if something were buzzing around and taking in information.) You don’t do it. need the company’s hardware to utilize Bee AI – you can simply interact with the AI ​​via an iPhone app – but Zollo says the wearable offers a richer experience because it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app will be available at the end of the month.

The wearable is elementary. It comes with two noise-isolating microphones, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a busy environment, the wearable should be able to hear both sides. It can be worn as a wristband or attached to a shirt. There is an “Action” button in the middle; pressing once mutes the microphones, and pressing again turns them on. You can press and hold the button, and this action is user-configurable, which can either process the current conversation or wake up the “Buzz” AI assistant to ask it a question. (The wearable does not have a speaker, so responses will be spoken over the phone.) When the microphone is muted, a red LED lights up. You might think there’s a green LED on while recording, but there’s no indication that this wearable is recording everything around you.

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