AI Today: Amazon's Bee wants to remember your conversations for you
Two new devices turn your conversations into notes and to-dos. The privacy protections cover the owner. Everyone else in the conversation is another matter.
Amazon's Bee has launched two devices that listen to your conversations and turn them into notes. The Bee Frontier, a $74.99 band worn on the wrist or clipped to clothing, is on sale now. The Bee Eclipse, a $99.99 card that attaches magnetically to the back of a phone, follows soon after.
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What happened
Amazon bought Bee last year, and these are its first new devices since. Each has a single button and a light that shows when it is summarising a conversation. The Frontier is water resistant and lasts up to seven days on a charge.
The idea is that you stop taking notes. Agree a time with friends and Bee drafts the calendar invite. Talk through a care plan with a doctor and Bee writes it down. It connects to Gmail, Google Calendar and Outlook to draft emails and set up meetings.
The free tier gives summaries and 14 days of memory. Bee Pro, at $11.99 a month, adds unlimited summaries, suggested to-dos, a chat assistant and links to Alexa+ and Amazon.com.
Why it matters
Price is part of it. The Frontier costs less than half the $159 Plaud Note, one of the best-known rival recorders, according to TechCrunch.
The bigger change is where the notes go. Bee can now place orders on Amazon. The Verge reports that, for users who opt in, it can also suggest products based on what it hears. A device that listens to your day is now connected to a shop.
What is not known
The privacy protections are Amazon's own description and have not yet been independently tested. Amazon says raw audio is processed in real time and then deleted. Transcripts are encrypted with keys the device creates, so Amazon staff cannot read them unless the user chooses to share them.
Those protections cover the person wearing the device. They say little about everyone else. A friend across the table, a colleague in a meeting or a doctor in a consulting room did not buy a Bee and did not agree to be transcribed. The indicator light is the obvious answer. It only works if the other person notices it and knows what it means.
How much of a conversation feeds the shopping suggestions has not been spelled out in the launch details reported so far.
Bee throws away the recording and keeps the transcript and the summary. For most users, the summary is the version of the conversation they will go back to. A model wrote it.
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