CES 2025: Bee Pioneer’s AI wearable listens, learns and helps you get things done

The concept of AI wearables hasn’t exactly taken off. Devices like the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin have been largely criticized for over-promising while under-delivering. Now, a new company, Bee, is taking another stab at the concept with its wrist-worn artificial intelligence device.

The Bee AI device, called Bee Pioneer, is essentially designed to listen to you go about your day and use the information it collects to build a personalized knowledge base about your life. It can remember things you’ve done during the day, create to-do lists based on what it hears, and even search through conversations you’ve had. It’s also relatively affordable, at just $49.99, unlike other AI devices.

I had a chance to check out Bee Pioneer, its AI-related service Bee AI, and talk to Bee co-founders Ethan Sutin and Maria de Lourdes Zollo for myself at CES 2025.

Scalable design

If you were to see someone wearing a Bee Pioneer device, you wouldn’t necessarily assume it’s an AI device. It’s a very scaled-down wristband that looks a lot more like a basic fitness tracker than anything else. It is made of black plastic and has a multipurpose button. Pressing the button once mutes the microphones and pressing it again mutes them.

Alternatively, you can press and hold the button to ask the bee’s AI helper a question. However, this action is customizable, so you can configure it to do something else.

When you ask it a question, it will answer through the built-in speakers in your phone – there are no built-in speakers in the device itself. The main reason is that if you’re wearing headphones, you’ll want the response to come through the headphones instead of the wristband, where you might not hear it.

The microphones are also meant to be relatively sensitive. According to Bee co-founder Ethan Sutin, if you can hear whoever you’re talking to, even in a busy environment, the device should be able to hear them and you.

The device does not rest on the wristband at all. Instead, the module embedded in the wristband can be removed and attached to other accessories, such as clips, so that it can be worn over your clothes. This is a nice idea, although I’m not sure most people would want to wear it on their clothes instead of a bracelet.

It’s all about the app

The wristband is just a listening device that sends data to the app, which is where the power of Bee comes into play. Through the app, you can see chat transcripts, summaries of your location history, and more. It’s basically a log of your life, including conversations.

I found the app relatively well designed, even though I didn’t play with it for long. You can ask questions about conversations you’ve had, and the AI ​​assistant will use that data to provide personalized answers. The app does not store any audio, although it does store full transcripts of all your conversations. When you ask the assistant a question, it answers using a mix of templates from major commercial and open source languages, including ChatGPT and Gemini.

Credit: Christian de Looper for Mashable

The app allows you to tag people you talk to. It will remember voices for future conversations and tag them accurately.

Perhaps most interestingly, it will use information about your conversations to create reminders and to-do lists for you. According to the co-founders I spoke with at CES 2025, this is a bit more complicated than you might assume. The AI ​​assistant must determine which tasks are essential and which are not important enough to add to the to-do list. Bee can also connect to services like Gmail and Google Calendar, so you can ask questions about your emails and upcoming events.

The future of personalized AI

However, Bee has massive plans for the future of its services. It mostly hopes that its AI assistant can perform tasks for you in much more useful ways. One of the company’s CES demos included the assistant independently completing tasks on the phone. However, those tasks were not performed on your phone; instead, they were on an emulated Android phone in the cloud, with sessions logged for services like WhatsApp.

This was extremely cool to see and sets the device apart from some of the competition. While the final iteration of the service won’t include an emulated phone view, watching it complete a task on the phone, such as sending a WhatsApp message, was like watching a human doing it.

Credit: Christian de Looper for Mashable

That said, even while Bee AI can fully control your phone, the co-founders told me they don’t necessarily plan for Bee AI to become the do-it-all AI assistant that replaces everything else. Instead, they think Bee AI can coexist with other AI services and be useful for different purposes. For Bee’s part, the service offers a more personalized experience that helps users remember their conversations and what they need to do.

Privacy concerns

Of course, all of this raises many questions about privacy. The privacy concerns about having an emulated phone in the cloud are obvious, but given that the feature isn’t available yet, it’s probably not worth discussing at length. Bee says the biggest reason this particular feature is still in beta is that it’s still figuring out how to ensure its privacy and security.

But there are other privacy-related concerns. Bee may not save actual audio clips, but it does save full transcripts of your conversations, which is cause for concern. Sure, you can turn the device off, but it’s hard to remember to do that proactively when you’re just living your life and having private conversations with someone like your spouse.

The company is also proactive about security. It says it will set up a bug bounty program to encourage research into security-related bugs in its services. Co-founders generally value privacy and security as important aspects of their business. After all, if there were any security issues, the product might not survive long.