I recently had the opportunity to try a wearable from Beethe AI wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and since updated with a number of new features.
Like other AI wearables, Bee is designed to be a kind personal assistant: it records, transcribes and summarizes the user’s conversations throughout the day, providing an ongoing note-taking feature that’s useful if you’re forgetful or just want to be more organized in your life. If you sync it with your calendar, it can also send you notifications and reminders about things you’re supposed to do during the day.
TechCrunch has written about Bee before, and the way it works is pretty simple: the user turns it on, puts it on, syncs it with the Bee mobile app, and enters some basic personal information. Bee has a built-in recorder that can be turned on and off by clicking the wearable’s button. When Bee registers, a green light flashes. When it isn’t, the green light goes out. After a conversation is recorded, the app will create an automated summary that’s easy to read, as well as a full transcript of the conversation.
Your mileage may vary depending on how exciting (or not) this whole conceit is. The problem for me is that I’m a privacy junkie. In a world where the average person is bombarded on all sides by constant digital surveillance, I value every opportunity I get to avoid being recorded. As such, the idea of walking around with an eavesdropping gizmo strapped to my wrist 24/7 wasn’t particularly appealing.
However, even I have to admit that — in the right context — Bee could have a lot of potential to help organize your life.
Bee really comes in the context of professional engagements. If your day is full of meetings and you struggle to keep everything straight, Bee could be a moderately capable assistant.
During a business-related phone call this week, I turned on the Bee after receiving confirmation that I could record our meeting. The app then faithfully uploaded a summary of the conversation, helpfully breaking down each part of our conversation so I could review it later without having to listen to our entire conversation again. This was undeniably useful, although it should be noted that this is not something that is significantly different from what is offered by other transcription services such as Otter or Granola and others, which also offer automatically generated transcripts and summaries.
That said, you could envision a situation where a professional who needs to navigate between various meetings throughout the day would be well served by this device. You could just keep Bee running all day and later check the chat summaries for anything you’re unclear on.
Bee does a relatively good job of summarizing conversations, but the actual transcriptions offered by the wearable can be a bit crappy. Previous reviewers have noted that you usually have to manually enter the names of other speakers, as Bee doesn’t always know who’s speaking. During my conversation, I noticed that he had also left out certain sections of our conversation – nothing huge, but not a complete account of everything that had been said.
I also took the Bee on my mid-week night out with my friends and left it running all night. Given the fact that we watched Reservoir DogsI was slightly afraid that the portable would confuse all the gross carnage with actual bloodshed and possibly set off some sort of internal alarm. However, Bee knew – basically – what was going on. The wearable understood that we were watching a movie, and in the summary of the events that followed, the wearable wrote the conversation “Analyzing a Tarantino movie scene.”
While the Bee shows early promise as a professional tool, I wouldn’t want this thing to record me in my personal life. Surprisingly, Bee has been marketed largely as a product for personal use. To be comfortable with this, you need to be comfortable with Bee having access to most of your offline and digital life.
Indeed, to work well, Bee needs extensive mobile permissions — including access to your location, photos, phone contacts, calendar, and mobile notifications. You can also share your health data with it — if, for whatever reason, you want it to know about your sleep patterns or your resting heart rate.
The vast accumulation of data collected by Bee is stored in the cloud, which—again, for the digital privacy enthusiast—presents its own concerns. In a message to tech YouTuber Becca Farsace, Bee apparently revealed a demo of the device operating entirely locally. If the company were able to produce such a device, I’d be very impressed — and might even consider buying one. That said, Amazon hasn’t offered any updates on those plans.
As for Bee’s digital privacy protectionthe company says it offers encryption to protect user data — both at rest and in transit. In its privacy policy, the company states that it has “implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information” that the company processes. Bee also claims it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and uses continuous security monitoring. That all sounds good enough, though it’s worth noting that Amazon — like many big tech companies — has suffered the occasional a data security issue or two (not surprising for a company that rules as much of the global cloud environment as it does, but still).
In short, the Bee is a curious piece of hardware that, given some time and some tweaks, could have some promising professional applications down the line. As a digital assistant for your personal life, however, it may prove a bit too invasive for some users.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
