Amazon is buying Bee, a startup that places AI in your wrist. Bee CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo says on LinkedIn that the corporate is becoming a member of Amazon to assist “convey really private, agentic AI to much more clients.”
Bee makes a $49.99 Fitbit-like device that listens in in your conversations whereas utilizing AI to transcribe all the pieces that you simply and the folks round you say, permitting it to generate personalised summaries of your days, reminders, and ideas from inside the Bee app. It’s also possible to give the system permission to entry your emails, contacts, location, reminders, pictures, and calendar occasions to assist inform its AI-generated insights, in addition to create a searchable historical past of your actions.
My colleague Victoria Track got to try out the device for herself and located that it didn’t at all times get issues fairly proper. It tended to confuse real-life conversations with the TV reveals, TikTok movies, music, and flicks that it heard. When requested about Amazon’s plans to use the identical privateness measures provided by Bee, similar to its coverage towards storing audio, Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller says the corporate “cares deeply” about buyer privateness and safety, including that the corporate will work with Bee to provide customers “even better management over” their units when the deal closes.
“We’ve been robust stewards of buyer information since our founding, and have by no means been within the enterprise of promoting our clients’ private data to others,” Miller says. “We design our merchandise to guard our clients’ privateness and safety and to make it straightforward for them to be answerable for their expertise — and this method would after all apply to Bee.”
Miller additionally says the phrases of the deal are “confidential,” and all Bee staff have “obtained affords to hitch Amazon.”