Amazon's Wearable Gamble: The Future of B

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0:44Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about Bee, which is a Amazon owned wearable company. It's only$50 for this product. We talked more about how these physical wearables are going to become more popular. Jayden has actually bought one of these and he's demoed it. So today he's going to tell us all about it. Jayden, why don't you tell us, is this a useful product? I will say in its current state and form, Bee is a terrible product. And I'm disappointed to say that because I would love to say that it was awesome. Essentially, I bought it after Amazon started kind of initiating this acquisition.

1:15And I was like, Oh my gosh, Amazon's buying this random AI hardware company. This is interesting. Let me go check it out. So I'll tell you what it does. And I don't think this is a bad thing. I think it's a V1. It's not going to be that great. Hopefully it gets better in the future. On the show, we'll talk a little bit about why, why it's not great and why Amazon bought it and where it's going to go. But before we do that, I want to tell you guys about the school community. Every single week, Jamie and I record a video on school. And right now we are doing a whole segment talking about how to build a software company.

1:44If you are not a coder, not a developer, if you have an app or software idea, how to do it. Last week, I built a fully fledged podcast distribution company, which will soon in the future be available on podcaststudio.com. It's a URL I own. I use it for my local service podcast studio business, which is going to move into another domain name and podcaststudio.com is going to be a fully fledged online podcast studio software platform. I did this entire project, which by the way, in the past, I've spent over, you know,$600 ,000 on my current project AI box. I've spent three years developing that platform.

2:20But this new one that I've worked on in the last week, I have spent, you know, four days and$200 and built a fully fledged software product that is absolutely amazing. It works. It does so many cool integrations. If you want to learn, if you want to follow along on the journey on how I built that and how you can build something to go check out the school community, it's linked in the description. All right, let's talk about what's going on with B from Amazon. So the thing that's really cool about B is that it is essentially a little microphone on a wristband on your wrist, you have to push a button to enable it.

2:56And then it's going to listen to your audio conversations, transcribe them. And like, basically, that's what it does. It gives you notes on like your, your conversations now. So it's kind of just like a little spy recorder device that ties into a transcription tool, which like everyone like, like, this is a very simple device to build, if I'm being honest, I mean, you have to go figure out manufacturing in China. But like, it literally is a microphone and it links up to probably open AI's transcribe model. And that's their whole product. The reason why it's not that great is because you have to remember to push and turn it on.

3:33It has memory storage limits. You have to get the audio off of it. It doesn't actually listen that well. I don't think it uses that great of a transcription model. I don't actually think it's using open AI. I think they try to use a free open source one. Those are all the reasons why it's not that great of a tool. It's not super useful. So then the question becomes, why did Amazon buy it? Because the way it works is I think it was like 50 bucks to buy it, but then you have to have a subscription. I'm trying to remember what my subscription was for it. It might have been like 20 bucks a month or something.

4:01And that's basically for ongoing usage support. It's not that great of a product, but I have a couple of theories on why Amazon bought it. Jamie, would you use something like this? Like basically a wristband that records you? I mean, I could see it. If it was useful and if it worked well for business purposes, I could see it being helpful. I don't see like just wearing it, you know, to pick my kids up from school or anything. You know, I don't see that purpose. It looks based on the picture kind of looks like a sport band. Do you wear yours on your wrist then? I mean, I've worn it a few times to test it out.

4:34But yeah, that's the purpose of it is like you wear it on your wrist. It's like a watch. But it's like if you already have a watch, it doesn't have doesn't tell the time. So it wouldn't do the watch face thing. I would imagine. It's pretty far from your mouth. maybe that's why it doesn't record very well. Yeah, it's far from your mouth. So it doesn't record that good. So my theory on why they bought it is I think Amazon wants to get into there's a couple reasons. Number one, I think they actually can get a lot of audio content from it, especially depending on how they do the terms of service with it.

5:03But like for training their models, they have Alexa already. And so they're, you know, it basically you can imagine they'll turn this into Alexa on your wrist is I think what their vision is for the product. So it doesn't really matter, you know, what it does so much as what it can do in the future. And so I think they have all the technology. If they stick Alexa into this, you have Alexa on your wrist. I think that's where they want to go with it. As it is today, I'm shocked that people have purchased this. But I also think that there's a really interesting play you can make with, which I think they're going to go in this direction, which is like doing these like meeting summary note taker things, right?

5:38Like when you hop into these Zoom calls and Google meets nowadays, everyone's got like Fireflies or like all of the other meeting recorders that listen to the whole meeting and they transcribe it and send you like a document after. Right. I think that they will. Those are really awesome. But what those what those tools don't do is in-person meetings. So you might do like a, you know, like a call and it gives you the thing and then you go to the boardroom and you do like a meeting with like five people and then you don't have that same functionality. So I think if you tied in a tool like this with that software, you could have it transcribe and give you notes for all of your meetings.

6:11And I think that's probably where this tool would become useful. It's not so much like for me, just like an everyday person walking around and talking to people. Like I was at my podcast studio when I was testing this out, uh, like, uh, I think like a month ago and, you know, turning it on and talking to clients and stuff like there wasn't really that much stuff that needed, or like I'd have it going for like a whole podcast episode. Like I didn't really need to get like a summary of my podcast episode or my conversations with my clients, but I think for meetings, it would be useful. and then I think it's like the only way you can really get a physical version of a meeting so I think that could be useful yeah and I get that I guess that you know that's a pretty basic functionality but could definitely be useful to some people I could also see if it is connected to Alexa and you have like a fully integrated smart home you know you could be like you know preheat my oven to 425 and you know turn you know shut my lights off or unlock my house you know I could see that being you know kind of a cool function for some people in the future as well but yeah not definitely not for everybody and then I do have an interesting thought like imagine if this was a portable Alexa which would be sweet right um you would have to make sure that it is voice enabled but also there's like a whole bunch of I feel like security risks because if it's like unlock my house or open my garage doors or heat up my house like imagine if someone stole that and then they could just like wreak havoc on your house by talking to it and telling it to control your life.

7:34That would be pretty annoying or dangerous, right? They could break into your house with it unless it had vocal recognition, which I know some companies are doing. Like, I don't know if you've noticed this, but every time I call American Express nowadays, they're like, you know, press one to opt into vocal recognition. And then instead of having to like type in your security pin, we'll just use your voice to do it, which again, isn't even that secure because literally anyone listening to this podcast can go clone my voice on some voice tool. I could go like get into my into my American Express.

8:06Now I've exposed myself. My American Express cards are all going to get hacked. Thanks, guys. Everyone's listening for that. I'll never tell you my mother's maiden name. Great. You go look that up on Facebook, too. Oh, man. See, we're kind of like all doomed with this voice cloning stuff. So anyways, all I'm saying is like, it's cool. But there's like a lot of security vulnerabilities with that, too you know yeah i would be curious to know do you know have any idea if b owns any patents related to this because maybe it was like a patent purchase because for the technology for the future you know maybe they have other ideas as well yes i think um so this is what the this is what the co-founder said specifically about this um she said we see each other as complementary friends talking about amazon and alexa um b has the understanding of outside the house and alexa has the understanding of inside the house of course there'll be a future where those two things come together so that's basically going to our point of an am an elect on your wrist everywhere you go um i don't know if they have like any specific patents that like will make it so that they're the only ones that can do this because this isn't that novel in my opinion of like a use case so i don't think they have anything like exclusive and i think it's pretty hard i mean even if they did chinese companies would knock it off and do it anyway so like i really don't know how defensible that is beyond just like it had a submarine name recognition They'd already built a product.

9:26This is what I think they're doing. Amazon, I think, is basically copying Meta's play when Meta bought Oculus and turned into Meta VR. I think they're just copying that same play. The Meta Oculus was not that good when it first came out. I have like an early version of it and like it sort of give you a headache and it was a little blurry and like a little disorienting. And they did a lot of work and made it much better in the future. And then today, I think Meta is the winner because they took all that technology that they spent billions of dollars making their metaverse, which is RIP. But all of that technology that they did develop did get put into the Meta Ray-Ban collaboration, which is a very popular product today.

10:04A lot of people buy it. And I think it's the future of augmented reality, virtual reality. Basically where it goes is like Meta Ray-Bans, you're just gonna be able to superimpose like, oh, I want directions. And it's gonna have a little arrow on your eye that's like, okay, turn right here to get to the house and you just follow that. And or like, it'll have little pop-ups for something that you're doing. So I think that that's actually very useful. The Meta Rayband has a speaker right next to your ear so you can hear from it, has a microphone attached to it. It's not very far from your face so you can talk to it and it has cameras on the front of it so it can see.

10:35So for all intents and purposes, I think Meta is a big winner in this wearable space. Amazon wants to get a piece of that. And I think the fastest way they can do it is just with an audio direct tying into Alexa. And so they're gonna essentially buy this hardware company that doesn't have a very fleshed out product. probably buy it pretty cheap and then stick their technology into it, ramp it up and try to make it this really fancy thing like Meta did to Oculus. Interesting. Yeah. Well, hey, thanks for listening. If you got any value out of this episode, we would really appreciate a rating or review wherever you're listening.

11:08Those help us out a lot and help us be able to reach more people. Don't forget to check out the AI Hustle School community for our new series on software development. You can become a software developer even if you don't know how to code. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. What's up, Illinois? It's Bluff here, and I've got something better than foot-long hot dogs and deep-dish pizza. It's SpinQuest.com, America's newest social casino with over a thousand games available for you to play from the comfort of your own home. With instant cash prize redemptions, and new users can take advantage of a$30 coin package for only$10.

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