I tried Amazon’s Bee wearable and I’m intrigued and a little creeped out

I recently had the opportunity to test a wearable from Bee, the AI-powered wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and has since updated with a number of new features.

Like other wearable AI devices, the Bee is designed as a gentle personal assistant: it records, transcribes, and summarizes user conversations throughout the day, providing constant note-taking 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 also send you alerts and reminders about things you’re supposed to do throughout the day.

TechCrunch has written about Bee before, and the way it works is pretty simple: the user turns it on, launches it, syncs it with the Bee mobile app, and enters some basic personal information. The Bee has a built-in recorder that can be turned on and off by tapping a button on the wearable. When Bee is recording, a green light flashes. When this is not the case, this green light turns off. After recording the conversation, the app will create an automatic, easy-to-read summary, as well as a full transcript of the conversation.

Your mileage may vary depending on how vanity-triggering it is (or not). The problem for me is that I’m a fan of privacy. In a world where the average person is subjected to constant digital surveillance from all sides, I appreciate any opportunity I can get to not be registered. So, the idea of ​​walking around with a bug strapped to my wrist 24/7 wasn’t particularly appealing.

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

Bee really comes into play in the context of professional engagements. If your day is full of meetings and you have trouble keeping things clear, Bee may be a moderately competent assistant.

During a work-related phone call this week, I activated Bee after getting confirmation that our meeting could be recorded. The app then faithfully recaps the conversation, helpfully breaking down each part of our conversation so I can review it later without having to re-listen to our entire conversation. This was undoubtedly useful, although it should be noted that this is not markedly different from those offered by other transcription services, such as Otter or Granola and others, which also offer automatically generated transcripts and summaries.

However, you can imagine a situation where a professional who has to move between different meetings throughout the day would be well served by this device. You can just keep Bee running all day, and then, review the conversation summaries for anything you’re unclear about.

The Bee does a relatively good job of summarizing conversations, but the actual texts provided by the wearable can be a bit of a mess. Previous critics have noted that you usually have to manually enter the names of other speakers, because Bee doesn’t always know who’s speaking. During my conversation, I noticed that she also deleted certain sections of our conversation — nothing huge, but it wasn’t a complete accounting of everything that was said.

I also took Bee to bi-weekly movie night with my friends and left her on all night. Due to the fact that we watched Reservoir dogsI was somewhat afraid that the wearable would mistake all the hackneyed carnage and bloodshed for real life and perhaps trigger some sort of internal alarm. However, Pi knew – basically – what was happening. The wearable detected that we were watching a movie, and in the summary of events afterward, the wearable called the conversation “Tarantino movie scene analysis.”

Although the Bee shows early promise as a professional tool, I don’t want this thing to record me in my personal life. Oddly enough, Bee was marketed largely as a product for personal use. To be comfortable with that, you need to be comfortable with Bee having access to the majority of your digital and offline life.

In fact, for Bee to work well, it needs extended 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 to know about your sleep patterns or resting heart rate.

The vast accumulation of data Bee collects is stored in the cloud, which — again, for digital privacy enthusiasts — raises its own concerns. In a message to tech YouTuber Becca Farsace, Bee seemingly revealed a demo of the device that runs entirely locally. If the company were able to produce such a device, I would be very impressed, and would probably consider purchasing one. However, Amazon has not provided any update on these plans.

As for Bee’s digital privacy protection, the company says it provides encryption to protect user data – both at rest and in transit. The company states in its privacy policy that it has “implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information” the company processes. Bee also claims that it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and uses constant security monitoring. This all sounds very good, though it’s worth noting that Amazon – like many big tech companies – has had a data security issue or two from time to time (which isn’t exactly surprising for a company that governs as much of the global cloud environment as it does, but still).

In short, the Bee is a curious piece of hardware that, with some time and some tweaking, could have some promising professional applications in the future. However, as a digital assistant for your personal life, it may be a bit annoying for some users.