Amazon wants you to Bee-lieve wearable AI can recall it all for you

Amazon wants to ensure you have a personal AI that you can carry with you anywhere, listening in on your conversations so it can remind you of key details – and give you personalized shopping recommendations, of course. The global online bazaar has unveiled two new AI-based products from Bee, a startup in wearable devices that it acquired last year in a deal said to be worth $300 million. Bee’s original product for Amazon was tried out and sort of given approval by friend of The Register Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, earlier this year. One new gizmo, Bee Frontier, is designed to be worn like a watch or one of those fitness trackers, although to our mind it looks more like you are wearing a doorbell. The other, Bee Eclipse, is a slimline and lightweight device about the size of a credit card that attaches to the back of your phone magnetically, like a limpet. Both are intended to listen in to your conversations and help you remember important details, like when you are meeting your friend for a pint later and at which hospitality outlet. The devices take note of the details you might otherwise forget, and then turn them into useful conversation summaries, to-dos and reminders, Amazon says. The pair of devices feature a single button to turn on or off, and a visible indicator that lights up when one is listening in and its AI is summarizing the conversation. When enabled, the eavesdropper gathers context from your conversations to provide insights and recommendations. Summaries of your conversations can be accessed via a Bee mobile app on iPhone or Android (linked via Bluetooth), or an all-new desktop app. These can be organized using templates for things such as lectures, or users can just review memories from the past few days to see what you discussed. The Bee devices pick up on trends or themes that recur, and recommend personalized goals and actions. That sounds alarm bells for us, as it suggests the AI is designed to get to know you, and what you like. Along with the new hardware, Bee has now gained the ability to connect to Amazon’s Alexa+ AI assistant and Amazon.com, which means that you can ask Alexa for a meeting summary - or get personalized shopping recommendations from Amazon based on what your personal earwig has gleaned. However, Amazon says that the latest Bee products respect user privacy, as audio is processed into insights in real time and not stored, while transcripts are encrypted and only the user can access them. Bee Frontier is claimed to have IP67 water resistance, up to seven days of battery life, and has a USB-C charging port. Bee Eclipse also has a USB-C port but is said to last for more than 21 days of use from a single battery charge. Both devices come in a choice of colors, with Bee Frontier available now for $74.99 and Bee Eclipse due to be available shortly for $99.99. ®