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I spent whole CES day wears a little yellow bracelet. To people nearby, he probably looked like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI recorded everything around me. It didn’t save audio like a typical voice recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and a readable summary of my conversations in person.
A few days before the show, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which was officially launched today. Guess what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then let AI distill the data 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’s better to stick it to your forehead near your temple—it has an electroencephalogram inside it, and Omi claims that if you specifically think about talking to the wearable, it will understand and receive it. your request.
This is a new world where artificially intelligent wearables continuously record the world around us. Originally relegated to speakers and our phones, but quickly moving to our wrists and faces, voice assistants required at least an active action, such as a tap or wake word, to activate the ability to listen. But the future also includes the next wave of hardware assistants Friend pendantit can receive information passively and work in the background. They are always listening.
The wearables that lead this space are often cheap—Bee AI’s watch is just $50 and Omi’s sticky beads are $89—but the real magic is in the software, as it often requires a subscription. large language models to analyze your conversations.
Bee AI
Bee AI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. Both previously worked on Squad (which Sutin co-founded), 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 (formerly known as Twitter), and the pair briefly joined to work on Twitter Spaces. Zollo previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin says he explored the idea of a personal AI assistant back in 2016, when chatbots were popular, but the technology wasn’t there yet. Not so anymore. The company launched its Bee AI platform in beta last February and has an active community providing feedback. He only started selling Pioneer gear a week ago. (The name “bee” plays on the idea of environmental computing, as if something is buzzing around and receiving information.) You don’t. need The company’s hardware to use Bee AI — you can simply interact with the AI through an iPhone app — but Zollo says the wearable provides a richer experience because it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app is on the way at the end of the month.
Wearable simple. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a busy environment, the wearable should do to hear both sides. It can be worn as a wristband or clipped to your shirt. In the center is the Action button; pressing once mutes the microphones and pressing again reactivates them. You can press and hold the button, and the action is user-configurable, so it can trigger things like wake up the AI assistant “Buzz” to process the current conversation or ask it a question. (The wearable does not have a speaker, so responses will be played through your phone.) There is a red LED when the microphone is muted. You’d think a green LED would flash while typing, but there’s nothing to indicate this wearable is collecting everything around you.
