Who the GoogleBook is For - DTNS 5374

Tom Merritt (0:08)

This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 15th, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and try our darndest to help each other understand.

Sarah Lane (0:18)

Today, Iyaz Akhtar from PC Mag is joining in on his week using, his first week rather, using the Google Book, and Amazon launches some AI hardware.

Tom Merritt (0:28)

I'm Tom Merritt.

Sarah Lane (0:29)

And I'm Sarah Lane.

Tom Merritt (0:30)

Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

Bees.

Bee is actually the company that announced its first two new wearable devices, hence the plural, bees. These are their first new devices since being acquired by Amazon last year. The Bee Frontier is for wearing. You can pin it to your clothes. You can use it as a pin or a brooch, or you can wear it on your wrist. It's IP67 water-resistant, has up to seven days of battery life, comes in onyx, sage and lavender, or as I call them, black, green and purple.

The Bee Frontier sells for 75 bucks. It's available now.

So it's a bit cheaper than comparable alternatives like the Plaid Note, which is 159 bucks, Pocket AI, 129 bucks. Then there's the Bee Eclipse. This is a card. It's a credit card size device that you can attach to the back of your phone magnetically. Comes in midnight honey and blush, aka yellow and pink.

I think there's also black and white. The Bee Eclipse costs 100 bucks, and it will be available soon. You can see the details, but you can't order it yet. They both do the thing where they record conversations and then summarize them for you, maybe help create to-do lists out of that. You can do it for free. You don't need a subscription to do it. It gives you up to 14 days of memory, though there's a limit on how many summaries you can generate. So for $12 a month, you can pay to get a subscription that gives you unlimited summaries and integration with apps. So you can integrate obviously with stuff from Amazon, but also Apple HealthKit, Gmail, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook among others. You also get to do suggestions. If you're paying, it'll suggest things to you. It'll give you something called daily memories, conversation templates and a chat assistant with a paid subscription. And part of that integration with the subscription is with an Amazon Echo where you could give the Echo permission to record a conversation and then share that with Bee for processing as well. Audio recordings are processed in real time by the Bee device and then immediately discarded. So if you use the Amazon Echo, you're not getting all those privacy protections, but if you're just using the Bee device as you are, the transcripts it creates are then encrypted on the device with keys that are under your control, Amazon cannot access them, of course, unless you share the transcription with Amazon for some reason.

Sarah Lane (2:57)

I'm still on the fence about any AI device that you're pinning to your lapel. Wearing on your wrist is not that weird, unless you're already wearing a smart watch and you're running out of real estate.

Tom Merritt (3:10)

You've got an aura ring and a Fitbit banner and an Apple watch.

Sarah Lane (3:15)

We're tracking everything. But it wasn't that long ago that a lot of us were scratching our heads like, who's this for? Who's this really for? I've got the Plodno Pro, which is comparable to the Eclipse that does attach to the iPhone. And I find it to be it's very good at what it does. I also am not a person who's sitting down having lots of meetings where I'm needing to take notes afterwards. I mean, we all take meetings here on DTNS and talk to each other. But we're pretty good about just sort of taking our own notes for just general purpose like, hey, I need to remember to do this and that and maybe make this into something that's more of an action item, something for me. That's all good. And there are many people that I know who live by this stuff.

Not everybody wants to wear something. You've got the granola folks.

Not hippies, but people who use the app Granola, which is software-based and does a lot of the same thing. But I feel like there's been such an uptake in people saying, wow, this actually is really, really helpful for me. But I think it really depends on what you're doing for work. And it doesn't even have to be career stuff. Just sort of, how are you organizing your day? So I think that Amazon offers, I mean, they're certainly not more expensive than the alternatives, and Amazon's very good at that.