Amazon is rolling out its first new products since buying Bee, the maker of an always-listening AI wearable. On Thursday, the company introduced the Bee Frontier, a wearable that can be worn on the wrist or pinned to clothing, along with the Bee Eclipse, a credit-card-sized device that magnetically attaches to the back of a smartphone. The Frontier costs $74.99 and is available now on Amazon. The Eclipse costs $99.99 and will arrive soon after.
Amazon bought Bee last year. The original device was a relatively unknown startup product that sold for about $50 and summarized the conversations its wearer had throughout the day. The new models keep that core idea. They listen, then produce transcripts, summaries and to-dos, and they can push some of that work into other apps.
The Frontier is a redesign of the original. Its recording button is more prominent, and it comes in Onyx, Lavender and Sage. It has dual microphones with advanced noise filtering, a recording indicator light, an IP67 water-resistance rating, USB-C charging and up to seven days of battery life. The Eclipse comes in Silver, Midnight, Honey and Blush. It is a non-wearable option, and because it is larger, it has a bigger battery, which Amazon rates at 21 days on a single charge.
Both devices have a single button to turn them on and off. Both have an indicator light that comes on while the device is summarizing a conversation.
The Eclipse puts Bee in more direct competition with AI recorders such as the Plaud Note and the Pocket AI device. The Plaud Note sells for $159, the Note Pro for $189 and the Pocket for $129. Bee is pricing the Eclipse below the Plaud Note line, and the Frontier well under all of them.
In everyday use, the idea is simple. If you agree on a time to meet friends, Bee remembers the date and creates a calendar invite. Students can use it to take lecture notes. Patients can use it to keep track of a care plan discussed with a doctor.
All Bee devices create conversation summaries and recaps for free and keep 14 days of memory. The Bee Pro subscription, at $11.99 a month, unlocks unlimited summaries, suggested to-dos, daily memories, a personal chat assistant, conversation templates, third-party app integrations and a desktop app. The subscription also brings the feature Amazon is emphasizing most: integration with Amazon.com and Alexa+.
That integration is opt-in. If you enable it, Bee can surface shopping suggestions drawn from your conversations. Amazon offered an example. If a spouse asks you to pick up cat litter, a product card could appear on your Amazon homepage, or the Bee app could show a button linking to the product. Separately, Alexa+ lets users ask for Bee insights, summaries or to-dos without touching the device.
Bee also connects to productivity tools such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, so it can draft emails, set up meetings and surface action items. Users can also upload photos or connect the device to Apple’s HealthKit to add wellness data to their insights.
The company is making privacy a central part of the pitch, and the timing is notable, given recent public backlash against so-called surveillance technology. Amazon says Bee uses a private computing security architecture that does not store raw audio. Audio is processed in real time and then deleted. Transcripts are encrypted with keys that the device creates and controls, so no one else, including Amazon employees, can access them unless the user shares them on purpose.
Voice recognition is another piece of the picture. Users can optionally connect Bee to Alexa, which lets an Echo device use Voice ID to recognize when the wearer is speaking, so it can record those conversations for Bee’s insights. Amazon says users can delete transcripts and summaries at any time.
Speaker attribution has limits. Bee’s AI is trained on the owner’s voice during setup. Other speakers are not automatically identified unless they agree to let Bee train on their voices as well. Amazon told The Verge that the devices can also be set to stop recording automatically when no sound is detected for a set period.
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