In July 2025, Amazon expanded its portfolio of artificial intelligence products by acquiring Bee, the startup behind the eponymous wearable AI device that functions as a personal assistant in the background, listening to you throughout your day and transforming relevant information into recommendations, reminders, and other proactive actions.
Now, Maria de Lourdes Zollo, co-founder of Bee, has provided a valuable update on the status of the project through a post on Amazon’s website.
The goal of Bee is to become an essential yet unobtrusive device for users. In other words, it seeks to join Alexa as a natural complement that helps deliver comprehensive, proactive, and personalized experiences.
This wearable listening device begins processing your conversations once you activate it, working in real time and without storing any audio. In this way, it is capable of understanding your needs, habits, and commitments, creating an accurate image of your life that becomes richer over time.
“Bee extracts information from months of conversations, emails, calendar data, and HealthKit health metrics—things that would otherwise go unnoticed. It becomes a mirror that helps you see patterns you have been living with. The way you usually react when you are stressed. The commitments you make on Mondays that disappear by Friday. The gap between how you believe you manage your time and how you actually do it,” explains Maria de Lourdes Zollo, co-founder of Bee, in a post on Amazon’s website.
The Bee device is shaped like a bracelet and costs $49.99. On the startup’s website, it is specified that its battery may last up to 160 hours (almost 7 days) on a single charge. It features an advanced noise-filtering system and understands up to 40 different languages. For now, Bee only ships within the United States, and its app is currently available exclusively for iOS.
After being acquired by Amazon last year, Bee introduced new functionalities designed to ensure that its AI accompanies and assists users in all areas of their lives. These updates are as follows:
“When we founded Bee, we never imagined that we would end up at Amazon. However, the more we built, the more apparent it became that achieving our vision for wearable AI required a partner with the right scale and extensive experience to make it a reality. Now, at Amazon, we are excited to turn Bee into the personal AI companion we have always envisioned—developing new features and devices with the potential to reach customers everywhere.”
The concept behind this device is quite unique and, for many individuals, may directly conflict with their desire to safeguard their own privacy. While for years there have been speculations that major technology companies such as Google or Meta listen to us through our phones—a concern that has kept many people on alert—it can be difficult to conceive of purposely allowing a bracelet to record our daily conversations.
However, it may be precisely within this “control” that Amazon and Bee have found the key for users to agree to this exchange in which they grant access to their private lives in return for hyper-personalized recommendations. In fact, being able to provide consent at any given moment may transform this experience into something more appealing and less invasive for individuals.
In the words of Maria de Lourdes Zollo: “Privacy has been part of our DNA since day one. Bee processes conversations in real time and never stores audio. Since our integration into Amazon, we have implemented a new layer of privacy that ensures that only customers have access to their transcripts and summaries, and that no one else—not even Amazon or Bee—may access them unless customers choose to share their data. Customers may also delete their personal data, including transcripts and conversation summaries, at any time. We are excited to continue innovating in this area.”
Photo: Amazon
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