- Amazon has released the Amazon Bee Frontier and Amazon Bee Eclipse, two AI devices featuring microphones for audio transcription
- The Bee Frontier is a wristband wearable, while Bee Eclipse is a magnetic phone attachment
- Both devices will transcribe conversations, set event reminders, and enable 'personalized shopping'
Last year, Amazon acquired Bee, a startup with a single product: a wearable that featured a microphone that fed audio files to an LLM, which transcribed the audio into searchable text. We've seen these kinds of devices before, such as the Pebble Core Index 01, the Plaud Note AI pin, and most recently the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, which offer similar Siri Recap and Live Rewind features.
Now, Amazon has officially thrown its hat in the AI wearable ring and unveiled two new products: the Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse. The Bee Frontier, priced at $74.99 (around £56 / AU$108) is a fitness-tracker style Pebble with up to seven days of battery, that can be worn on your clothes or an included wristband, like a Fitbit. However, instead of collecting biometric data, it features dual microphones with a prominent 'on' button, that records and transcribes audio into summaries and recaps.
Amazon says that "when turned on, Bee gathers context from your conversations and connected apps to provide insights and recommendations,'" creating summaries in the Bee app or a purpose-built desktop app, with "templates tailored to your specific needs". Students might sort summaries and transcriptions into a Lectures template, while office workers may have a Meeting Minutes template.
Bee Eclipse is a slightly different version of the concept, which is a magnetic credit card-sized version of the device which snaps to the back of a smartphone, designed to "give customers more options beyond a wearable". It costs $99.99 (around £75 / AU$145) It's similar to devices like the Plaud Note, which shares the magnetic credit-card design and single-button record. The Bee Eclipse shares the same transcription software and access to the Bee app with the Bee Frontier.
Amazon says "Bee Frontier is for people on the go who want to stay present in the moment. Whether it’s remembering the details of important meetings, taking note of the coffee plans you made in passing, or simply ensuring you purchase the dish soap you said you’d buy, Bee Frontier will remember the details for you."
Upgrade to a Bee Pro subscription
Transcription isn't the Bee range's only trick though. Bee comes with a 14-day memory, summaries and recaps. However, a Bee Pro subscription, which costs $11.99 (around £9 / AU$17) per month, includes "unlimited recent conversation summaries; integrations with Amazon.com and Alexa+; integrations with third-party applications; suggested to-dos; daily memories; a personal chat assistant; and conversation templates; and the Bee desktop application."
Those integrations with third-party apps include Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, allowing Bee to bee-come (sorry) a personal assistant by adding events and reminders to your calendar and draft emails, along with other apps like Apple Healthkit.
That integration with Amazon.com, however, allows Bee to "enable even more personalized shopping recommendations" by surfacing items you mention in conversations, with "product recommendations on the Amazon homepage, and in the Bee mobile and desktop apps".
Buzzy, or a sting in the tail?
As mentioned, AI recorders are nothing new. They see a lot of use in the workplace — many journalists like myself now use AI transcription services to help us turn interviews into text, for example, and offices use them for meeting notes.
However, the push to use devices like this in our personal lives, to encourage buying more products and remembering coffee dates, may steer away from the obvious usefulness of the feature and verge on 'creepy', depending on who else is being recorded, whether or not they have given you permission to do so, and the insidiousness of recommending products based on casual conversations.
Amazon and Bee, like Apple did when debuting its Live Rewind and Siri Recap features, has ensured privacy features have been laid out in no uncertain terms: audio is never stored, the microphone is button-operated with a recording LED light like Meta Glasses, and transcripts are encrypted. It remains to be seen whether these assurances are enough for widespread adoption.