I spent one complete The day of CES Wearing a small yellow bracelet. To unsuspecting humans nearby, it might have looked like a fitness tracker. But all the while, this yellow Pioneer wearable from BA AI recorded everything around me. It wasn’t storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my individual chats.
A few days before the trade show, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which was officially unveiled for the first time today. Guess what it does? Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then relay the information to AI to give you actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant. Omi’s wearable can go around your neck, but it’s best worn on your forehead near your temple—it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you’re specific about talking to the wearable If you think logically, the device will understand and be excited to receive. your request
This is the new world we’re in, with artificially intelligent wearables constantly recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed on speakers and our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—require minimal active engagement such as a tap or wake word to activate their listening ability. But the next wave of hardware assistants, including the upcoming ones friend pendantCan passively absorb information and work in the background. that Always listening.
The wearable hardware leading this space is often cheap—BAI’s watch is just $50, and Omi’s stick-on bead is $89—but the real magic is in the software, which often requires a subscription because it’s in multiples. taps Large language model To analyze your interactions.
BA AI
BAI was founded by Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin. The two previously worked at Squad (Sutin co-founded), which enabled media screen sharing in video chats so people could watch the same movie or YouTube video together remotely. The company was acquired by X (when it was called Twitter), and the pair joined briefly to work on the Twitter space. Zolo previously worked on Tencent and Musical.ly, which later became TikTok.
Sutin says he explored the idea of a personal AI assistant in 2016 when chatbots were all the rage, but the technology wasn’t quite there yet. Not so now. The company launched its AI platform in beta in beta, with an active community providing feedback. It started selling its Pioneer hardware just a week ago. (The name “bee” plays with the idea of ambient computing, as if something is buzzing around and taking in information.) You don’t. need The company’s hardware to use B AI—you can only interact with the AI through an iPhone app—but Zolo says the wearable provides a better experience because it can record continuously throughout the day. An Android app is due at the end of the month.
Wearable is simple. It has two microphones for noise isolation, and Sutin says that if you can hear the person you’re talking to in a busy environment, the wearable should Be able to listen to both sides as well. It can be worn as a band on the wrist or clipped to your shirt. In the center is an “Action” button; Pressing it once turns off the mics, and pressing it again turns them back on. You can press and hold the button, and this action is user-configurable, so that it can trigger things like processing the current conversation or waking up a “buzz” AI assistant to ask a question. (There’s no speaker on the wearable, so responses will be spoken through your phone.) When the mic is muted, there’s a red LED. When it’s recording, you’d think the green LED would light up, but there’s nothing to indicate that this wearable is picking up everything around you.
