i spent a Complete ces day Wearing a small yellow bracelet. To the strangers nearby, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable device from Bai AI recorded everything around me. It wasn't storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized task lists and readable summaries of my individual chats.
A few days before the trade show, I spoke to the founder of another new company, Omi, which was officially unveiled for the first time today. Guess what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then the AI will relay the information to you to give you actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi's wearable device can go around your neck, but it's best worn by sticking it to your forehead near the temple – it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you specifically ask the wearable to talk to you, If you think about it, the device will understand and will be ready to receive your request.
This is the new world we are in, in which artificially intelligent wearable devices are constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants — who first came on speakers and on our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces — require at least an active engagement like a tap or wake word to activate their ability to listen. But the next wave of hardware assistants, including the upcoming friend pendantCan passively absorb information and work in the background. they are always listening,
The wearable hardware leading this field is often cheap — B AI's watch is just $50, and Omi's stick-on bead is $89 — but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription as it does many of the same. taps into large language models To analyze your conversations.
bee ai
BI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. The two previously worked on Squad (Sutin was the founder), which enabled media screen sharing in video chat so people could watch the same movie or YouTube video together remotely. The company was acquired by X (when it was called Twitter), and the pair joined forces to work on Twitter Spaces for a period of time. Zolo has previously worked at Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin says he explored the idea of a personal AI assistant in 2016 when chatbots were very popular, but the technology wasn't there yet. Now that is not the case. The company launched its AI platform in beta last February, with an active community responding. It started selling its Pioneer hardware just over a week ago. (The name “B” plays with the idea of ambient computing, as if something is moving around and taking in information.) You don't need The company's hardware for using Bee AI — you can only interact with the AI through the iPhone app — but Zolo says the wearable offers a richer experience because it can be recording continuously throughout the day. An Android app is coming at the end of the month.
Wearable is simple. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you're talking to in a busy environment, the wearable Needed Be able to listen to both sides too. It can be worn as a band on the wrist or clipped to your shirt. There is an “Action” button in the center; Pressing it once mutes the mics, and pressing it again enables them again. You can press and hold the button, and this action is user-configurable, triggering things like waking the “Buzz” AI assistant to process the current conversation or ask a question. (There's no speaker on the wearable device, so answers will be spoken through your phone.) When the mic is muted, there's a red LED. You'll notice a green LED light up while it's recording, but there's nothing to indicate that this wearable device is capturing everything around you.