Amazon launched two AI devices from Bee, the wearable startup it acquired in 2025, that listen to conversations and turn them into summaries, to do lists, and reminders.
Bee Frontier is a personal AI device that you can wear on your wrist or clip to your clothes. It’s water-resistant, can last up to seven days on a single charge, and is designed to stay with you and record conversations throughout the entire week “so it can take note of what matters and ignore what doesn’t, even in noisy environments like a crowded restaurant or open office.” Frontier is available now for $74.99.
Bee Eclipse is a slim device about the size of a credit card that attaches to the back of your phone magnetically. It lasts more than 21 days on a single charge, and effectively serves the same function as Frontier, but in a more streamlined package, connected to your phone, which you already take everywhere, including the toilet. (Yeah, I hear you scrolling TikTok in the stall next to me. Well, at least when I pause my TikTok long enough to hear yours.) Eclipse will be available soon for $99.99.
Basic summaries, recaps, and 14-day memory come free on either device, but the $11.99 monthly Bee Pro plan is needed to unlock unlimited conversation memory and to connect Bee to Alexa+ and Amazon.com, which uses Bee’s data to recommend products on its homepage. (Of course it does. LOL.) Amazon says audio is deleted once it’s processed and that each transcript is locked with an encryption key controlled by the owner’s device.
Remember Humane? The wearable pin company that launched with $240M in funding and an incredible amount of fanfare, and then sold itself to HP for parts less than a year after the pin started shipping? The founders must be spinning in their graves right now with all these new wearables to hit the market. Humane was ahead of its time and lacked the backing of a powerful enough audio-focused LLM to get the job done that it promised.
What about privacy? No, not your privacy. You’ve obviously already given that up just by having a Bee device. I’m talking about everyone else’s privacy. People are already raising red flags.
Jeff Williams, a former AWS senior principal security engineer who’s now CISO at Sigma360, wrote on LinkedIn that Bee asks the wrong person for consent, since the only consent prompt appears on the wearer’s phone, while the people being recorded have no way to say no. About a dozen US states, including California and Washington, generally require everyone in a private conversation to consent before it’s recorded. Williams says Bee should omit other people’s voices from the transcripts by default, unless they’ve enrolled their voices and agreed to be recorded, which is a pretty good idea, but not likely to happen.
Remember when people used to theorize that their phones were listening to their conversations so that Big Tech could serve more personalized ads? Everyone has at least one story from when they were talking about something they’d never searched for, and then suddenly they were being served ads about it.
Well now, between Alexa devices, Bee wearables, Meta smart glasses, and other always-listening devices, we’re simply handing Big Tech the conversations on a silver platter. I look forward to the stories about ads for divorce lawyers or baby clothes popping up in someone’s feed after a private conversation with their friend, because that’s coming.
