Amazon buys Bee AI wearable that listens to everything you say

Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that puts AI connected your wrist. Bee CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo says connected LinkedIn that the institution is joining Amazon to assistance “bring genuinely personal, agentic AI to adjacent much customers.”

Bee makes a $49.99 Fitbit-like device that listens successful connected your conversations portion utilizing AI to transcribe everything that you and the radical astir you say, allowing it to make personalized summaries of your days, reminders, and suggestions from wrong the Bee app. You tin besides springiness the instrumentality support to entree your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to assistance pass its AI-generated insights, arsenic good arsenic make a searchable past of your activities. 

My workfellow Victoria Song got to effort retired the instrumentality for herself and recovered that it didn’t ever get things rather right. It tended to confuse real-life conversations with the TV shows, TikTok videos, music, and movies that it heard. When asked astir Amazon’s plans to use the aforesaid privateness measures offered by Bee, specified arsenic its argumentation against storing audio, Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller says the institution “cares deeply” astir lawsuit privateness and security.

“We’ve been beardown stewards of lawsuit information since our founding, and person ne'er been successful the concern of selling our customers’ idiosyncratic accusation to others,” Miller says. “We plan our products to support our customers’ privateness and information and to marque it casual for them to beryllium successful power of their acquisition — and this attack would of people use to Bee.”

Miller besides notes that the woody isn’t yet closed, and its presumption are “confidential.” All Bee employees person “received offers to articulation Amazon.”