The next wearable AI device will listen to everything, all the time

I have spent complete CES day He wears a small yellow bracelet. To the unsuspecting humans nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But all the while, Bee AI’s yellow Pioneer wearable device was recording everything around me. It didn’t store audio like a typical recording app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my personal conversations.

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 he does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, then have the AI ​​deploy the information to give you insights and actionable tasks from your day, just like a personal assistant. The Omi wearable can go around your neck, but you’re better off wearing it stuck to your forehead near your temple — it has an EEG inside it, and Omi claims that if you specifically think about talking to the wearable, the device will understand and prepare To receive your order.

This is the new world we live in, where wearable devices with artificial intelligence are constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants — which first arrived on speakers and on our phones, then quickly moved to our wrists and faces — have at least required active engagement such as a tap or wake word to activate their eavesdropping ability. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes devices, is coming Friend necklaceit can passively absorb information and work in the background. they Always listen.

The wearables driving this space are often cheap — the Bee AI watch costs just $50, and the Omi sticky pill is $89 — but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription because it taps several Large linguistic models To analyze your conversations.

Bees AI

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

Photo: Tristan Debrauer

Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Soutine. They both previously worked at Squad (Soutine was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could watch the same movie or YouTube video together remotely. The company was acquired by X (when it was called Twitter), and both joined briefly to work in Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.

Soutine says he explored the idea of ​​an AI-powered personal assistant in 2016 when chatbots were very popular, but the technology didn’t exist yet. This is not the case anymore. The company launched the Bee AI platform last February in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It just started selling its flagship devices a little over a week ago. (The name “Bee” plays on the idea of ​​ambient computing, as if something was buzzing and receiving information.) needs The company’s devices use Bee AI — you can only interact with the AI ​​via the iPhone app — but Zollo says the wearable offers a richer experience as it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app is on the way at the end of the month.

Simple wearable. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Soutine says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a crowded environment, the wearable He should Be able to hear both parties as well. Can be worn as a strap on the wrist or clipped to your shirt. There is an Action button in the middle; Pressing it once mutes the microphones, pressing it again enables them again. You can press and hold the button, and this action is user configurable, so they can trigger things like processing the current conversation or waking up the AI ​​assistant “Buzz” to ask it a question. (There’s no speaker on the wearable, so answers will be spoken through your phone.) When the microphone is muted, there’s a red LED. While recording, you might think the green LED would light up, but there’s no indication that this wearable is capturing everything around you.