Amazon’s Bee wearable records your conversations and summarizes them

In short: Amazon’s Bee is a wrist-worn device that can record what you say all day, turn it into text, and write summaries, but it may feel intrusive for many people.

What's going on

TechCrunch tested Bee, an AI-powered wearable that Amazon acquired last year. Bee works like a personal note-taker on your wrist. It records conversations, turns the audio into written text (a transcript), and then creates a shorter summary you can skim later.

The device has a button to start and stop recording. A green light flashes when it is recording, and turns off when it is not. After you record something, the Bee mobile app shows both the summary and the full transcript.

In work settings, the reviewer found Bee genuinely useful. In one phone meeting, Bee produced a clear summary that broke the call into sections, making it easier to review without replaying the whole conversation. This is similar to services like Otter or Granola, but Bee is designed to be ready all day, like keeping a notepad open at all times.

The test also found limits. Transcripts could be messy, speaker names often need manual fixes, and some parts of conversations were missing.

What to watch

Privacy is the biggest question. To work well, Bee asks for broad access on your phone, including location, contacts, photos, calendar, and notifications. Bee also stores the collected data in the cloud (online servers run by a company), which can worry people who do not want a detailed record of their lives saved outside their devices. Bee says it uses encryption (like locking data in a safe while it travels and while it is stored), but Amazon has not shared updates on plans for a version that keeps everything on the device.

Source: TechCrunch AI