Amazon today introduced two new Bee personal AI devices: the Bee Frontier wearable and the Bee Eclipse phone attachment. Both are meant to listen to your conversations and turn them into summaries, to-dos, reminders, and insights in the Bee app.
You can wear the Frontier on a soft silicone wristband or clip it onto your clothes, and it comes in Lavender, Sage, and Onyx. It has dual microphones with noise filtering, IP67 water resistance, up to seven days of battery life, and USB-C charging. It's available now for $74.99.
The Eclipse is about the size of a credit card, 4.6mm thick and 48.9g, and it snaps magnetically onto the back of your phone. Amazon rates its battery at more than 21 days, and it uses four MEMS mics plus a vibration microphone so it can pick up both sides of a phone call as well as in-person chats. The Eclipse starts at $99.99 in Silver, Midnight, Honey, and Blush, and it will go on sale soon.
Both devices share the same software idea. When they're on, Bee builds conversation summaries you can open in the mobile app or a new desktop app, with templates for things like lectures or brainstorms. With a Bee Pro subscription - $11.99 a month or $99 a year, with 30 days included free - you can also connect Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Apple HealthKit, and Photos, plus ask Alexa+ for hands-free summaries and get shopping suggestions on Amazon from things you've mentioned.
Of course, a wearable or phone clip that listens to your conversations is going to raise privacy questions, and Amazon knows it needs to address those. It says both models run on Bee Private Compute, where audio is processed in real time and then deleted, never stored. Transcripts are encrypted with keys that only your device creates and controls, and Amazon says even it can't access your data unless you choose to share it.
You turn each device on or off with one button and there's a visible status LED. You can set the Frontier to shut itself off after a stretch of silence, and you can delete transcripts and summaries whenever you want. The obvious issue is that when they're on, they're capturing spoken conversations around you. Amazon's own Eclipse listing notes that consent laws vary by US state and country, and that it's on you to tell others and get permission - Bee won't figure that out for you.