Tech
I tried Amazon’s Bee wearable and am both intrigued and slightly creeped out
I recently had the opportunity to test out a wearable from Bee, the AI wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and has since updated with a number of new features.
Like other AI wearables, Bee is designed as a kind personal assistant: it records, transcribes, and summarizes the user’s conversations throughout the day, providing an ongoing note-taking capability that’s useful if you’re forgetful or just want to be more organized about your life. If you sync it with your calendar, it can also send you alerts and reminders about things you’re supposed to do throughout the day.
TechCrunch has written about Bee before, and the way it works is pretty simple: the user powers it up, puts it on, syncs it with the Bee mobile app, and enters some basic personal information. Bee has a built-in recorder that can be turned on and off by clicking the wearable’s button. When Bee is recording, a green light flashes. When it’s not, that green light goes off. After a conversation has been recorded, the app will create an automated summary that is easy to read, as well as an entire transcription of the conversation.
Your mileage may vary on how exciting (or not) this whole conceit is. The problem for me is that I am something of a privacy enthusiast. In a world where the average person is beset from all sides by constant digital surveillance, I appreciate any opportunity I can get to not be recorded. Therefore, the idea of walking around with an eavesdropping gizmo strapped to my wrist 24/7 was not particularly appealing.
Yet, even I have to admit that — in the right context — Bee could have a lot of potential to help organize your life.
Bee really comes through in the context of professional engagements. If your day is full of meetings and you have trouble keeping it all straight, Bee could be a moderately competent assistant.
During a business-related phone call this week, I activated Bee after getting confirmation that I could record our meeting. Afterward, the app faithfully regurgitated a summary of the conversation, helpfully breaking down each segment of our talk so that I could review it later without having to re-listen to our entire conversation. This was undeniably helpful, although it should be noted that this isn’t something that’s markedly different than those offered by other transcription services, like Otter or Granola and others, which also offer transcriptions and auto-generated summaries.
That said, you could envision a situation in which a professional who has to navigate between various meetings throughout the day would be well-served by this device. You could just keep Bee running throughout the day and, later, review the conversation summaries for anything you’re not clear about.

Bee does a relatively good job at summarizing conversations, but the actual transcripts offered by the wearable can be a bit of a mess. Previous critics have noted that you usually have to manually enter the names of other speakers, as Bee doesn’t always know who is talking. During my conversation, I noticed that it had also omitted certain sections of our chat — nothing huge, but it wasn’t a complete account of everything that had been said.
I also took Bee to my semi-weekly movie night with my friends and left it running throughout the night. Given the fact that we watched Reservoir Dogs, I was mildly afraid that the wearable would mistake all of the vulgar carnage for real-life bloodshed and potentially trigger some sort of internal alarm. However, Bee knew — basically — what was happening. The wearable figured out that we were watching a movie and, in the summary of events afterward, the wearable labeled the conversation “Tarantino Film Scene Analysis.”
While Bee shows early promise as a professional tool, I would not want this thing recording me in my personal life. Weirdly enough, Bee has largely been marketed as a product for personal use. To be comfortable with that, you have to be comfortable with Bee having access to a majority of both your offline and digital life.
Indeed, to work well, Bee needs expansive mobile permissions — including access to your location, photos, phone contacts, calendar, and mobile notifications. You can also share your health data with it — should you, for whatever reason, want it to know about your sleep patterns or your resting heart rate.
The large accumulation of data Bee collects is stored in the cloud, which — again, for the digital privacy enthusiast — presents its own concerns. In a message to tech YouTuber Becca Farsace, Bee apparently unveiled a demo of the device running entirely locally. Were the company able to produce such a device, I would be thoroughly impressed — and might even consider buying one. That said, Amazon hasn’t offered any update on those plans.
As for Bee’s digital privacy protections, the company says that it offers encryption to protect user data — both at rest and in-transit. In its privacy policy, the company states that it has “implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information” that the company processes. Bee also claims that it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and employs continuous security monitoring. That all sounds quite good, although it’s worth noting that Amazon — like many large tech companies — has been subject to the occasional data security issue or two (not exactly surprising for a company that governs as much of the global cloud environment as it does, but still).
In short, Bee is a curious piece of hardware that, given some time and some tweaking, could have some promising professional applications further down the road. As a digital assistant for your personal life, however, it might prove to be a little too invasive for some users.
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Tech
Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.
As part of a planned data center in Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The New York Times.
The NYT says the plant would burn natural gas and is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the U.S.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the data center will “be powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families.” (Data centers face growing political opposition for a number of reasons, including their effect on electricity costs.)
AI has already had a significant impact on Amazon’s carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.
The Amazon spokesperson said, “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” while also claiming, “Our commitment hasn’t changed.”
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Tech
OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide
NextSlide recently announced that it’s joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup’s team members now working on ChatGPT.
The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup’s product as one “that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.”
The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was “to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” So by joining OpenAI, the team will “continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement is coming “a few months late,” as the acquisition took place “earlier this year.”
Beshry was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart/cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021.
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Tech
X replaces ‘misaligned’ revenue sharing program with Original Content Rewards
X, the social media platform now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is shaking up how it pays influencers and creators.
In announcing the change, the company said it will be winding down its existing Revenue Sharing program and replacing it with something called Original Content Rewards. X will stop accepting new Revenue Sharing participants, while existing participants will continue earning money through September 7.
Then, starting on September 8, they’ll be able to apply for the new program. Participants will still need to subscribe to one of X’s Premium tiers, and there will be qualifying thresholds for follower count (500 verified followers) and impressions (500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in 90 days), but it sounds like the big change is the emphasis on originality.
What counts as original content? X said it can include original reporting and analysis, photos and videos created by the poster, or memes and graphics they’ve designed themselves. Commentary also counts, but “if your content regularly incorporates material created by others, you’ll need to contribute meaningful original value for it to qualify under our original content guidelines.”
The company also included examples of posts that won’t count as original, such as those just copied over from another account, downloaded from one account and re-uploaded to your own, or reposting content “without meaningful transformation.”
This announcement follows repeated attempts by X to reform the Revenue Sharing program, for example reducing payments to aggregators and “clickbait” accounts in April. But these efforts have also prompted complaints from popular accounts profiting from the current system; Musk even reversed some of those changes (giving a creator’s local audience more weight when calculating payouts) after a backlash.
In a post about the new changes, X’s Allegra Jacchia wrote that the existing program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.”
“Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts,” she said. “We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions, but ultimately the better decision was to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality.”
Jacchia added that X be “continue refining the program, improving our models, and raising the bar over time.”
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