Bee AI: The Wearable Ambient Agent

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hello, AI engineers. We're back with yet another first for the pod, covering AI wearables. 2024 was a very challenging year for AI hardware. After the buzz of CES last January, 2024 was marked by the meteoric rise and even harder fall of AI wearables companies like Rabbit and Humane. evenfriend.com, the first to launch in the AI pendant category, and which spurred Rewind AI to rebrand to Limitless and follow in their footsteps, ended up delaying their wearable ship date and launching an experimental website chatbot version. We have been cautiously excited about this category, keeping tabs on most of the top entrants, including Omi and Compass. However, so far the biggest winner still standing from the AI wearable wars is Bee AI, founded by today's guests Maria and Ethan. Bee is an always on hardware device with beam-forming microphones, seven-day battery life, and a mute button that can be worn as a wristwatch or a clip-on pin, backed by an incredible transcription, diarization, and very long context memory processing pipeline that helps you to remember your day, your to-dos, and even perform actions by operating a virtual cloud phone. This is one of the most advanced production-ready personal AI agents we've ever seen. So we were excited to be their first podcast appearance. We met Bee when we ran the world's first personal AI meetup in April last year, and you can go back in the Latent Space show notes for a link to Ethan's first talk to the Latent Space community. Maria and Ethan will also be joining us as speakers for the agents' engineering track at the AI Engineer Summit in New York City on February 21st, which is unfortunately now completely sold out.
However, you can sign up for the online live stream linked in the show notes, or join the workshops and leadership sessions. See you next week. Watch out and take care.

**Alessio** (2:06)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of SmallAI.

**Swyx** (2:14)
Hey, and today we are very honored to have in the studio, Maria and Ethan from Bee.

**Maria** (2:19)
Hi. Hi. Thank you for having us.

**Swyx** (2:22)
And you are, I think, the first hardware founders we've had on the podcast. I've been looking to have had a hardware founder, like a wearable hardware, like a wearable hardware founder for a while. I think we're going to have two or three of them this year. And you're the ones that I wear every day. So thank you for making Bee.

**Ethan** (2:40)
Thank you for all the feedback and usage.

**Swyx** (2:43)
Yeah, you know, I've been a big fan. You are the speaker gift for the Engineering World's Fair. And let's start from the beginning. What is Bee Computer?

**Ethan** (2:52)
Bee Computer is a personal AI system. So you can think of it as AI living alongside you in first person. So it can kind of capture your in real life context. So with that understanding can help you in significant ways. You know, the obvious one is memory, but that's that's really just the base kind of use case. So recalling and reflective, I know Swyx that you like the idea of journaling, but you don't, but still have some kind of reflective summary of what you experienced in real life. But it's also about just having like the whole context of a human being and understanding, you know, giving the machine the ability to understand like what's going on in your life, your attitudes, your desires, specifics about your preferences so that not only can it help you with recall, but then anything that you need it to do it already knows. Like if you think about like somebody who you've worked with or lived with for a long time, they just know kind of without having to ask you what you would want. It's clear that like that is the future that personal AI like is just going to be very, you know, that AI is just so much more valuable with personal context.

**Maria** (3:59)
I will say that one of the things that we are really passionate is really understanding this personal context because we'll make the AI more useful. Think about like a best friend that know you so well. That's one of the things that we are seeing from the user. They're using from a companion standpoint to professional use cases. There are many ways to use Bee, but companionship and professional are the ones that we are seeing now more.

**Swyx** (4:22)
Yeah. It feels so dry to talk about use cases.

**Maria** (4:26)
Yeah. It's like really like investor question.