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I am an expense complete Day of CES Wearing a little yellow bracelet. To unsuspecting people nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI recorded everything around me. It wasn’t saving audio like a normal recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my private chats.
A few days before the trade show, I spoke with Omi, the founder of another new company, which was officially unveiled for the first time today. Guess what? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then AI disseminates 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 strapped to your forehead near your temple—it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you’re specifically thinking about talking to the wearable, the device will understand and perk up to receive. your request
This is the new world we’re in, with artificially intelligent wearables constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed on speakers and our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—require active engagement, like a tap or a wake-up call, to at least activate their listening capabilities. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which include the upcoming Friend DulCan passively absorb information and work in the background. they are always listening.
The wearable hardware that leads this space is often cheap—Bee AI’s watch costs just $50, and Omi’s stick-on bid costs $89—but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription because it taps into multiple watches. Large language models To analyze your conversations.
Bee A.I
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 chat so people could watch the same movie or YouTube video together remotely. The company was acquired by X (when it was called Twitter), and the pair both joined briefly to work on Twitter Spaces. Zolo 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 doesn’t happen anymore. The company launched its Bee AI platform in beta last February, drawing an active community response. It started selling its Pioneer hardware just a week ago. (The name “bee” plays with the idea of ​​ambient computing, as if something is buzzing around and taking in information.) You don’t. need B is the company’s hardware to use AI—you can only interact with the AI ​​through an iPhone app—but Zolo says the wearable offers a richer experience because it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app is coming at the end of the month.
Easy to wear. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Sutin says the wearable is perfect if you can hear who you’re talking to in a busy environment. should Be able to hear both sides as well. It can be worn as a band on the wrist or clipped to your shirt. In the center is an “Action” button; Pressing it once mutes the mics and pressing it again enables them again You can press and hold the button, and this action is user-configurable, so it can trigger things like processing the current conversation or asking the “Buzz” AI assistant a question. (The wearable has no speakers, so answers will be spoken through your phone.) When the mic 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 picking up everything around you.
