Amazon has faced delays bringing its AI platforms for consumers but now the company has bought itself a brand that will aid its plans to make wearable devices. The online retailer giant has picked up wearable startup Bee that makes devices which puts AI on your wrist and other places.
The company’s CEO confirmed the development with a post on LinkedIn earlier this week, promising a truly personal agentic AI experience to more customers. The device in question is like a Fitbit watch that sits on your wrist and is able to use the power of AI to summarise conversations for you.
Amazon’s New AI Wearable Purchase: Privacy Concerns Incoming?
Bee makes a wearable device that uses AI to hear your chats with people, and helps you transcribe the content as well as summarise the conversations, give reminders around them and more. Listening to your personal chats can become a privacy concern, especially with Amazon’s own sketchy policies regarding audio recordings done through Alexa speakers.
The company, quoted byThe Verge, has pointed out that it will keep user privacy and security in mind with the Bee-centric devices and offer greater control to the users as to how it processes the data. It seems Amazon is going to absorb most of the staff working at Bee, including its CEO, Maria de Lourdes Zollo.
AI has made its move in the software and agentic space but the hardware segment is still in its early days but it is clear that giants like Amazon,OpenAI and even Jony Ive want a piece of the future.
The AI giant has completed a deal worth $6.5 billion to acquire Ive’s company, thereby giving them access to a whole range of AI hardware and software products in the coming years. AI-powered devices are not new and we have seen the likes of AI Pin and Rabbit in the last 12 months. Google already has a slew of products like the smart speaker and phones but it could use the Nest lineup to expand the categories and AI-centric hardware could be in its sights.
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