I spent an entire day of CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. To the unsuspecting nearby humans, 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 storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my in-person chats.
A few days before the trade show, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which was officially unveiled 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 actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi’s wearable can go around your neck, but it is best worn stuck to your forehead near your temple—it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you think specifically 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 continuously recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed in speakers and on our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—at least required active engagement like a tap or a wake word to activate their ability to eavesdrop. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes the forthcoming Friend pendant, can absorb information passively and work in the background. They are always listening.
The wearable hardware leading this space is often cheap—Bee AI’s watch is just $50, and Omi’s stick-on bead is $89—but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription as it taps into multiple large language models to analyze your conversations.
Bee AI
Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. Both previously worked at Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could remotely watch the same movie or YouTube video together. The company was acquired by X (back when it was called Twitter), and the pair both joined briefly to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo has previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which subsequently became TikTok.
Sutin says he explored the idea of a personal AI assistant back in 2016 when chatbots were all the rage, but the technology wasn’t there yet. That’s not the case anymore. The company launched its Bee AI platform last February in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It only just began selling its Pioneer hardware a little more than a week ago. (The “Bee” name plays with the idea of ambient computing, as if something is buzzing around and taking in information.) You don’t need the company’s hardware to use Bee AI—you can just interact with the AI via the iPhone app—but Zollo says the wearable offers a richer experience as it can record continuously all day. An Android app is on the way at the end of the month.
The wearable is simple. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re speaking with in a busy environment, the wearable should be able to hear both parties as well. It can be worn as a band on the wrist or clipped to your shirt. There’s an “Action” button in the center; 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 that can trigger things like processing the current conversation or awakening the “Buzz” AI assistant to ask it a question. (There’s no speaker on the wearable, so answers will be spoken out through your phone.) When the mic is muted, there’s a red LED. When it’s recording, you’d think the green LED would be lit up, but there’s nothing to indicate that this wearable is picking up everything around you.