Amazon put its boldest bet on ambient AI on sale Thursday. Bee, the startup Amazon bought last year, launched two devices built to listen to your day and hand back notes, reminders and to-dos: the Bee Frontier wearable and the Bee Eclipse phone attachment.
The Frontier is the one you actually wear, on a soft wristband or clipped to a shirt. It has dual microphones with noise filtering, IP67 water resistance, a USB-C port and up to seven days of battery life, and it comes in Onyx, Lavender and Sage for $74.99. Amazon says the longer you wear it, the better it gets at picking out what matters from your conversations.
The Eclipse skips the wearing part. It's a credit-card-sized slab, 4.6mm thick and 48.9g, that snaps magnetically to the back of a phone and listens in on calls using four MEMS microphones plus a vibration mic that picks up both sides of the conversation. Amazon rates its battery at more than 21 days. It costs $99.99 in Silver, Midnight, Honey and Blush, and while the Frontier is already shipping, the Eclipse is listed as going on sale soon.
What the AI actually does
Both devices feed the same Bee app. Summaries show up on your phone or in a new desktop app, with templates for lectures, brainstorms or doctor's visits. Basic use is free with 14 days of memory, Gizbot reports. A Bee Pro subscription at $11.99 a month, or $99 a year with a 30-day free trial, unlocks unlimited summaries, links to Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple HealthKit and Photos, and hands-free summaries through Alexa+. Bee can also surface shopping suggestions on Amazon based on things you've mentioned out loud, which is either useful or faintly unsettling depending on how you feel about Amazon already.
Amazon is aware of the obvious problem with a product that listens to everyone around you, not just its owner. The company says both devices run on what it calls Bee Private Compute: audio is processed into a summary in real time and then deleted, never stored, and the resulting transcripts are encrypted with keys that only the user's device holds. Amazon says it can't access that data unless the user shares it. Each device has a single button to turn listening on or off and an LED that shows its status, and the Frontier can be set to shut off after a stretch of silence.
That still leaves the legal and social question Amazon can't engineer away. Its own Eclipse product listing reportedly acknowledges that consent laws for recording conversations vary by US state and by country, and that it's up to the owner, not Bee, to tell the people around them and get permission before hitting record.
For the Bee Eclipse specifically, Amazon notes consent is required from whoever's on the other end of a call before recording starts. Neither device has an announced India launch or price. Gizbot points to Plaud's Note Pro and NotePin S, already selling in India at Rs 20,990 and Rs 19,990 respectively, as the closest thing available there for now. Whether Bee follows into that market, and at what price once import costs are factored in, is still an open question.
GDFiled by The Gadgets Desk
Audio, wearables, cameras, tablets, chargers and every other device worth carrying or plugging in.
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