Amazon is looking to make AI part of your daily life and has turned to the world of wearables to help. The tech giant has just acquired Bee AI, the maker of the eponymous device for your wrist or lapel that listens to everything happening around you.
Bee’s microphones and built-in AI transcribe it all in real time and make personalized summaries of your day and your stated upcoming tasks, and then make recommendations to improve your life based not only on what it hears, but the emails, calendar, contacts, photos, locations, and other data you allow it to access.
People already make jokes about how they will be discussing a product with someone else in person and, seemingly by magic, it will appear in their recommended products on Amazon. That can usually be chalked up to coincidence and forgetting previous searches, along with being unaware of your app permissions.
However, this may become part of Amazon’s business model, prompting people to wear microphones to listen all day and pay $50, plus a $19 monthly subscription, for the privilege.
Bee listening
Naturally, Amazon saw potential in Bee. Alexa has mostly been stuck inside the house despite attempts at smart glasses and other wearables. Bee is a chance for Amazon to make its AI a real-world concern, part of your actual conversations and routines, not just what you yell across the kitchen. That might be helpful, but it’s impossible not to think about what it might mean in terms of privacy and trust.
To be fair, Bee has a mute button you can hold down to pause recording when you need a moment of peace. But that assumes you realize you’re about to say something you might not want permanently archived by Amazon. Bee listens and turns your life into searchable text. Although the company claims it doesn’t retain the raw audio, the transcripts remain unless you delete them.
I don’t know if I want everything I mutter under my breath to be a searchable note. Not to mention whatever it might overhear from when I watch TV or movies at home.
I get the appeal of a little AI that remembers everything so you don’t have to. Remembering every chore and birthday would be great. But the line between deliberate memory aid and surveillance feels blurry with it. Especially when Amazon already has so much information.
Although Amazon has promised to work with Bee, allowing users to have control over their data, the actual shape of that control remains unclear for now. And control is too often translated into a complex settings menu and paragraph of boilerplate text in the terms and conditions.
I know plenty of people who would at least try out Bee, especially when it becomes an Amazon device with all the special sales and integration with the e-commerce site that implies. Perfect recall is a tempting commodity, but it has its price. If you’re willing to pay it, then I say go for it. Not every microphone is the gateway to Skynet. But skepticism and caution are essential if you want something to sit on your wrist and transform the events of your life into data points that might help sell you products.
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