Unleash the Ambiguity: The CES 2025 Game-Changer – A Love-Hate Relationship with the Always-Listening AI Assistant

The Humane AI Pin: A Wearable Assistant for the Future?

The Humane AI pin made a big splash at CES 2024, but the subsequent disappointment led to a cooler response to dedicated AI wearables at this year’s show. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t escape AI at CES 2025 – it’s now an integral part of many devices. However, there was one AI wearable that caught my attention – and I got to see it in action, though I’m still undecided about my feelings for it.

I’m referring to the Bee, a small pin that you can wear as a bracelet or clip, which syncs with an app on your phone to create detailed summaries of your day’s conversations. You can then use these notes to recall the outcomes of work meetings or reconstruct the stories your friends told you over dinner. Bee can also automate to-do lists and offer valuable insights on the day’s events.

The Bee app can even perform basic on-device functions with your phone. For instance, if a close friend messages you on WhatsApp about where to meet for dinner, you can speak into the pendant to instruct the AI to find a dinner spot that suits your preferences.

But beyond working for you, the team wants me to understand that Bee is designed to understand you. Over time, it will learn what insights, tasks, and people are most important to you and prioritize its alerts and aid based on your preferences, making it a more useful and bespoke assistant to each user.

The demo was brief, but I left with a sense that Bee might be somewhat useful – especially for a busy journalist with packed days of meetings at shows like CES. However, to truly understand Bee and assess its usefulness, I’ll need to use it for five days rather than just five minutes. I’m also unsure if I want to.

Personal Privacy Problems

Privacy is a major concern for me. Do I really want a small device recording me all day, every day? Bee is aware of these concerns and has already implemented useful privacy-focused features, with plans to add more, to protect users’ data. For a start, Bee doesn’t store any audio recordings; it processes the audio in real-time and then deletes it. You can also manually mute Bee using a button on the pendant, and set it to not make notes about certain topics of conversation.

The team is also exploring additional features based on user feedback, such as possibly adding geo-blockers so you can set Bee not to make notes when you’re in certain locations (like the office).

These concerns are inherent with all wearables and devices to some extent, but even though my smartphone knows more about me than I do, there’s something unsettling about wearing an AI pendant whose sole purpose is to always be listening.

I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve tested Bee properly. Perhaps I’ll discover my concerns are entirely misplaced, and AI assistants like it are the future we should all embrace.

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