I tried a new AI wearable at CES 2025 and actually came away impressed

At CES 2025, the term “AI” was everywhere. All the major brands were pushing it, including Samsung, TCL, Roborock, and more. Even the signage throughout the Las Vegas Convention Center featured AI-generated artwork.

When I heard about a new personalized AI wearable at the show called Bee, I couldn’t help but think of the AI fatigue we’ve seen ever since the failures of the Rabbit R1 (which debuted at last year’s CES) and the Humane AI Pin. Those products over-promised and under-delivered, solidifying the idea that most AI hardware probably just needs to be an app.

Honestly, when I walked into the demo suite with the two co-founders of Bee — Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin — I thought I was going to see another Humane or Rabbit fiasco. What I got instead was a nuanced, well-thought-out device that just might make personalized AI a real thing.

What is the Bee AI wearable?

Bee is a relatively inexpensive wrist wearable, about the same size and shape as a typical fitness tracker. However, it doesn’t have health sensors, a touch screen, or even a display. Instead, it has a single multi-function button and a pair of microphones.

The purpose of Bee is to listen to your voice all day, every day. The device transcribes that audio in real-time on your connected smartphone and then learns from it through a suite of various large language models (LLMs). Bee didn’t list out which ones it specifically uses, but it said it has its own in-house model as well as models from OpenAI and Google.

With this constant stream of data, Bee can learn all about you. It knows where you go, what you do, and what you say. It can then use this data for various purposes. For example, you can get a summary of your day, almost like a journal written by someone who’s followed your every move. You can also communicate with a personal chatbot trained on you and you alone, allowing you to ask questions like, “What did Maria tell me to wear to the party tonight?” It will scour through your data and give you a response.

The wearable hardware is incredibly simple and sips on power. It charges with a standard USB-C cable and can last up to seven days. You can wear it on your wrist, as you see in the photos above, but you can also remove the device from the yellow silicon strap and put it into a black shirt clip that comes in the retail box.

What can you do with Bee?

In the image above, you can see an AI-generated daily summary for Ethan, one of Bee’s co-founders. It says, “From finalizing media schedules to coordinating partner meetings, the day was filled with preparations for the journey to CES in Las Vegas.” It shows a map of Ethan’s locations (he traveled from San Francisco to Las Vegas that day) and tells him he had seven conversations.

Tapping any one of these bits of info will allow you to dive deeper into the data. In the image below, you can see a much more detailed summary of what Ethan did on January 7, 2025. You can read it if you want (Ethan gave me permission to share it), but I’ll save you the time: it’s AI slop. However, the core idea is quite interesting. Myself, I tend to use Google Calendar to figure out where I’ve been and what I’ve done when I can’t remember a date or location, but this is much better than that.

The chatbot aspect is also fascinating. Remember that Bee learns only from you, so the chatbot will be able to relate your feelings, actions, opinions, and more to whatever you ask it about.

As an example of what I mean, let’s say you want to go out to eat somewhere. You can ask your personal chatbot to find a restaurant in Las Vegas. Instead of just scouring for good places to eat, though, it will look for places you would want to eat. If it knows you’re trying to eat healthier, it will take that into account, as it would if it knows you’re a vegan.

Bee is also an automatic task scheduler; it can create tasks and reminders for you based on your conversations. For example, if you said to someone, “Oh yeah, I really want to investigate more into an African vacation,” Bee would automatically create a task for you and schedule it for sometime soon.

Unfortunately, Bee only works with iOS at the moment, but Ethan and co-founder Maria assured me that Android support will be available within the next few weeks.

Why isn’t this just an app?

The “Why isn’t this just an app?” question will likely dog every AI startup over the next few years. But Bee actually has a good answer to the question: because your smartphone would run out of battery too quickly.

In order for Bee to be most effective, it needs to be listening as much as possible. If you did this with your phone or smartwatch, the power draw would simply be too great. The Bee hardware solves this problem by always listening in and then letting your phone worry about the rest.

Of course, the next logical question is: “Why isn’t this a smartwatch app?” It does seem a bit incongruous that the Bee wearable needs to exist at all, considering that most people tech-savvy enough for something like this are already wearing a smartwatch or fitness tracker 24/7 anyway.

Ethan and Maria explained to me that Bee is already on the Apple Watch. However, Apple makes watchOS so limiting for developers that the app could never fully replicate what the standalone Bee wearable does. The pair told me they hope their eventual planned move to Wear OS will have better results. So, in the future, you might not need the wearable at all.

However, for now, to use Bee, you need the wearable. It currently costs $49 for early adopters.

Isn’t Bee a privacy nightmare?

This was the first question I asked Ethan and Maria. Won’t people who aren’t wearing Bee be pretty upset about being secretly recorded all the time? What do they do about certain states that require at least two parties to sign off on a recording before that recording becomes legal? Where are all the recordings stored? How does it get from Bee to your phone and then to the cloud?

These are all valid questions, and Bee explained most of them:

• Bee only records you. Bee has two microphones on it, which helps with audio isolation. You train the software on your own voice, and so it only cares about what you say. You can go even further with this and have it completely ignore all other voices, but that will make all your conversations seem one-sided, which could negatively affect the efficacy of Bee.
• Bee doesn’t store audio. Bee transcribes audio in real-time on your phone, but the audio itself is never recorded.
• The company doesn’t care about your data. Ethan and Maria are selling hardware and a subscription, which is how they plan to earn a profit with Bee. It is not collecting your data because it is not interested in it.
• Your data is encrypted, regardless. Even if Ethan and Maria changed their minds down the road, your data is encrypted on your phone, so they couldn’t touch it anyway. Additionally, your LLM is encrypted and siloed from all other LLMs on Bee’s servers.

Ethan told me that the hope one day is to have Bee exist completely on the edge — meaning on your devices exclusively and never going to the cloud at all. He pointed out that, six months ago, you couldn’t do any AI stuff on-device, but now you can do quite a bit. Eventually, LLMs will be smaller and more efficient, and everything Bee does will happen on your device alone. However, they don’t want to wait for that day, so they are relying on cloud-based solutions for now.

Granted, Bee’s security promises are just that — promises. Still, it was nice to hear from both co-founders that privacy was of utmost importance, and they were coming at Bee with the right principles in mind.

Hands-on with Bee: I’m excited to give it a shot

Maria and Ethan promised to send me a Bee wearable when Android support rolls out. Honestly, I’m excited to give it a shot. I’ve been told by numerous people in my life — therapists, friends, and family — that keeping a daily journal is important. But I’ve just never been able to set the time aside to keep one. Having a digital personal assistant who does all the leg work for me is an ideal compromise, allowing me to reflect on my day/week/month without needing to actually keep a journal.

Also, staying organized and on-task has always been a big part of my work life, and it seems like Bee could be very good at helping me be even better at that.

Once I have Bee, I’ll do a full review. But in the meantime, let me know in the comments what you think about this new product. If you want to learn more about Bee, check out the Bee website.