Amazon’s always-listening Bee wearable can now help you buy stuff

It’s an interesting time for Amazon to introduce these products, given the recent backlash against so-called surveillance tech. On that front, Amazon told The Verge in a press briefing that Bee devices encrypt transcripts, summaries, and to-dos via its “Private Compute” security architecture and don’t store audio recordings. Bee devices can also be programmed to automatically stop recording if no sound is detected after a certain period of time. As for whether transcripts are attributable, that depends. Upon setup, Bee’s AI is trained on the individual user’s voice. All other speakers are not automatically identified unless you ask them to also allow Bee’s AI to train on their voice. Whether that’s enough to assuage any privacy concerns, well, that depends on your definition of a recording.