01/09/2025

Your Next AI Wearable Will Listen to Everything All the Time

This is the new world in which we're living

I spent an entire day of CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. To the unsuspecting nearby humans, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee 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 in-person 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 have AI disseminate the information 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 is best worn stuck to your forehead near your temple—it has an electroencephalogram inside, and Omi claims that if you think specifically about talking to the wearable, the device will understand and perk up to receive your request.

This is the new world in which we're living, with artificially intelligent wearables continuously recording the world around us. Voice assistants—which first landed in speakers and on our phones, but quickly moved to our wrists and faces—at least required active engagement like a tap or a wake word to activate their ability to eavesdrop. But the next wave of hardware assistants, which also includes the forthcoming Friend pendant, can absorb information passively and work in the background. They are always listening.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.