I tried Amazon’s Bee wearable and am both intrigued and slightly creeped out

Recently I had the chance to test out a wearable Beethe AI ​​wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and has had ever since updated with a number of new features.

Like other AI wearables, Bee is designed as a friendly personal assistant: it records, transcribes, and summarizes the user’s conversations throughout the day, allowing you to constantly take notes that are 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 alerts and reminders about things you need to do throughout the day.

TechCrunch has written about Bee before, and the way it works is quite simple: the user turns it on, turns 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 is recording, a green light flashes. If not, the green light goes out. After a conversation is recorded, the app creates an automatic summary that is 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 kind of a privacy enthusiast. In a world where the average person is buffeted from all sides by constant digital surveillance, I appreciate every chance I can get to not be recorded. Therefore, the idea of ​​walking around with a listening device on my wrist 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, was not particularly attractive.

Still, even I have to admit that Bee – in the right context – could have a lot of potential to help organize your life.

Bee really comes into its own in the context of professional assignments. If your day is full of meetings and you’re struggling to keep everything organized, Bee can be a fairly competent assistant.

During a business call this week, I activated Bee after receiving confirmation that I could record our meeting. Then the app faithfully displayed a summary of the conversation, helpfully breaking down each segment of our conversation so I could watch it later without having to listen to our entire conversation again. This was undeniably helpful, although it should be noted that this is not something that is markedly different from the services offered by other transcription services, such as Otter or Muesli and others, which also provide transcripts and automatically generated summaries.

That said, you could imagine a situation where a professional who has to navigate between different meetings all day would be well served by this device. You can just keep Bee going all day and check the conversation summaries later for anything you’re not clear on.

Bee does a relatively good job at summarizing conversations, but the actual transcriptions offered by the wearable can be a bit of a mess. Previous critics have noted that you usually have to enter the names of other speakers manually, because Bee doesn’t always know who is speaking. During my conversation I noticed that certain parts of our chat had also been left out – nothing major, but it wasn’t a complete record of everything that had been said.

I also took Bee to my semi-weekly movie night with my friends and left it on all night. Given that we were watching Reservoir dogsI was slightly worried that the wearable would mistake all the vulgar carnage for real bloodshed and possibly trigger some sort of internal alarm. However, Bee knew – in principle – what was going on. The wearable learned that we were watching a movie and in the summary of events afterwards, the wearable named the conversation ‘Tarantino Film Scene Analysis’.

While Bee shows early promise as a professional tool, I wouldn’t want this thing to tie me down in my personal life. Oddly enough, Bee is largely marketed as a product for personal use. To feel comfortable with that, you need to be comfortable with Bee having access to most of both your offline and digital life.

To work properly, Bee requires extensive mobile permissions, including access to your location, photos, phone contacts, calendar, and mobile notifications. It also allows you to share your health information if, for whatever reason, you want information about your sleep patterns or resting heart rate.

The large amount of data that Bee collects is stored in the cloud, which – again for the digital privacy enthusiast – brings its own concerns. In a message to tech YouTuber Becca Farsace, apparently Bee a demo revealed of the device running completely locally. If the company could produce such a device, I’d be thoroughly impressed – and might even consider buying one. That said, Amazon hasn’t offered any updates on these plans.

As for Bees 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 all personal information” that the company processes. Bee also claims that it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and continuously monitors security. That all sounds pretty good, though it’s worth noting that Amazon – like many big tech companies – has occasionally faced data security issue or two (not exactly surprising for a company that controls as much of the global cloud environment as they do, but still).

In short, Bee is a curious piece of hardware that, with some time and some tweaking, could have some promising professional applications down the road. However, as a digital assistant for your personal life, it may prove a bit too invasive for some users.