I recently had the opportunity to test a wearable device from Bee, the AI wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and has since updated with a number of new features.
Like other AI wearables, Bee is designed as a personal assistant of sorts: it records, transcribes and summarizes user interactions throughout the day, providing a continuous note-taking capability that’s useful if you’re forgetful or just want to be more organized about your life. If you sync it with your calendar, it can even send you alerts and reminders about things you need to do throughout 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. The B has a built-in recorder that can be turned on and off by clicking a button on the wearable. When B is recording, a green light flashes. When that doesn’t happen, that green light goes out. Once the conversation is recorded, the app will create an automatic summary that’s easy to read, as well as a complete transcription of the conversation.
Your mileage may vary on how exciting (or not) this whole concept is. The problem for me is that I’m a privacy fanatic. In a world where the average person is surrounded by constant digital surveillance on all sides, I appreciate any opportunity I have to not be recorded. So, the idea of walking around with a secret device strapped to my wrist 24/7 wasn’t particularly appealing.
Still, even I have to admit that – in the right context – bees can have great potential in helping you organize your life.
The bee actually comes to the fore in the context of professional engagements. If your day is full of meetings and you’re having trouble keeping it organized, B can be a moderately capable assistant.
During a business-related phone call this week, I activated B after receiving confirmation that I could record our meeting. Next, the app faithfully reproduced a summary of the conversation, highlighting each section of our conversation so I could review it later without having to listen to our entire conversation again. This was undeniably helpful, though it should be noted that this isn’t something that’s markedly different from the services offered by other transcription services like Otter or Granolah and others, which also offer transcriptions and auto-generated summaries.
That said, you can imagine a situation in which a professional who has to navigate between different meetings throughout the day would be well served by this tool. You can keep B going throughout the day and, later, review the conversation summary for anything you’re not clear about.
Bee does a relatively good job at summarizing the conversation, but the actual transcript offered by the wearable can be a bit messy. Previous critics have noted that you usually have to manually enter the names of other speakers, as B doesn’t always know who is talking. During my conversation, I noticed that it also missed parts of our chat – nothing major, but it wasn’t a complete description of what was said.
I also took B to semi-weekly movie nights with my friends and let her go on all night. Given the fact that we saw reservoir DogsI was mildly afraid that the wearable device would mistake all the porn carnage for real-life bloodshed and potentially trigger some kind of internal alarm. However, B knew – basically – what was going on. The wearable detected that we were watching a movie and, in a summary of subsequent events, the wearable labeled the conversation “Tarantino movie scene analysis.”
While the B shows early promise as a professional tool, I wouldn’t want this thing to enter my personal life. Strange that beeswax has been largely marketed as a personal use product. To be comfortable with this, you have to be comfortable with B having access to the majority of both your offline and digital life.
In fact, to work well, Bee requires extensive mobile permissions – including access to your location, photos, phone contacts, calendars, and mobile notifications. You can also share your health data with it – should you, for whatever reason, want it to know about your sleep patterns or your resting heart rate.
The bulk 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 Farces, B apparently offered a demo of the device running completely locally. If the company were able to make such a device, I would be thoroughly impressed – and might even consider buying one. That said, Amazon hasn’t provided any updates on those plans.
As for Bee’s digital privacy protections, the company says it offers encryption to protect user data – both at rest and in transit. In its privacy policy, the company says it has “implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information” that the company processes. Bee also claims that it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and conducts continuous security monitoring. This all sounds good enough, though it’s worth noting that Amazon – like many big tech companies – has been subject to the occasional data security issue or two (not exactly surprising for a company that controls so much of the global cloud environment, but still).
In short, the B is a curious piece of hardware that, with some time and some tweaking, could find some promising commercial applications down the road. However, as a digital assistant for your personal life, it may prove to be a bit too invasive for some users.
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