I tried Amazon’s Bee wearable and am both intrigued and slightly creeped out

我试用了亚马逊的 Bee 可穿戴设备：既感到好奇，又有一丝毛骨悚然

I recently had the opportunity to test out a wearable from Bee, the AI wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and has since updated with a number of new features. Like other AI wearables, Bee is designed as a kind personal assistant: it records, transcribes, and summarizes the user’s conversations throughout the day, providing an ongoing note-taking capability that’s useful if you’re forgetful or just want to be more organized about your life. 最近，我有机会试用了 Bee 的一款可穿戴设备。这是一款 AI 手腕小工具，亚马逊去年收购了该公司，并为其更新了多项新功能。与其他 AI 可穿戴设备一样，Bee 被设计为一种个人助理：它能记录、转录并总结用户全天的对话，提供持续的笔记功能，对于健忘或希望生活更有条理的人来说非常有用。

If you sync it with your calendar, it can also send you alerts and reminders about things you’re supposed to do throughout the day. TechCrunch has written about Bee before, and the way it works is pretty simple: the user powers it up, puts it on, syncs it with the Bee mobile app, and enters some basic personal information. Bee has a built-in recorder that can be turned on and off by clicking the wearable’s button. When Bee is recording, a green light flashes. When it’s not, that green light goes off. 如果你将其与日历同步，它还能针对你全天需要完成的事项发送提醒。TechCrunch 之前曾报道过 Bee，它的工作原理非常简单：用户开机、佩戴、与 Bee 移动应用同步，并输入一些基本的个人信息。Bee 内置录音机，通过点击设备上的按钮即可开启或关闭。当 Bee 正在录音时，绿灯会闪烁；停止录音时，绿灯熄灭。

After a conversation has been recorded, the app will create an automated summary that is easy to read, as well as an entire transcription of the conversation. Your mileage may vary on how exciting (or not) this whole conceit is. The problem for me is that I am something of a privacy enthusiast. In a world where the average person is beset from all sides by constant digital surveillance, I appreciate any opportunity I can get to not be recorded. Therefore, the idea of walking around with an eavesdropping gizmo strapped to my wrist 24/7 was not particularly appealing. 对话录制完成后，应用程序会自动生成一份易于阅读的摘要，以及完整的对话转录文本。对于这种概念是否令人兴奋，不同的人可能有不同的看法。对我而言，问题在于我是一个隐私爱好者。在这个普通人时刻受到数字监控的世界里，我珍惜任何不被记录的机会。因此，全天候在手腕上佩戴一个窃听装置的想法对我来说并不怎么吸引人。

Yet, even I have to admit that — in the right context — Bee could have a lot of potential to help organize your life. Bee really comes through in the context of professional engagements. If your day is full of meetings and you have trouble keeping it all straight, Bee could be a moderately competent assistant. During a business-related phone call this week, I activated Bee after getting confirmation that I could record our meeting. Afterward, the app faithfully regurgitated a summary of the conversation, helpfully breaking down each segment of our talk so that I could review it later without having to re-listen to our entire conversation. 然而，我不得不承认，在合适的场景下，Bee 在帮助规划生活方面确实潜力巨大。Bee 在处理专业工作时表现尤为出色。如果你的日程排满了会议，且难以理清头绪，Bee 可以成为一个相当称职的助手。本周在一次商务通话中，我在确认可以录音后开启了 Bee。事后，该应用忠实地生成了对话摘要，并贴心地将谈话内容分段，让我无需重听全程即可回顾重点。

This was undeniably helpful, although it should be noted that this isn’t something that’s markedly different than those offered by other transcription services, like Otter or Granola and others, which also offer transcriptions and auto-generated summaries. That said, you could envision a situation in which a professional who has to navigate between various meetings throughout the day would be well-served by this device. You could just keep Bee running throughout the day and, later, review the conversation summaries for anything you’re not clear about. 这无疑很有帮助，但需要指出的是，这与 Otter 或 Granola 等其他转录服务提供的功能并无本质区别，它们同样提供转录和自动生成的摘要。话虽如此，对于那些每天需要在不同会议间奔波的专业人士来说，这款设备确实能派上用场。你可以让 Bee 全天运行，事后通过查看对话摘要来确认任何不清楚的信息。

Bee does a relatively good job at summarizing conversations, but the actual transcripts offered by the wearable can be a bit of a mess. Previous critics have noted that you usually have to manually enter the names of other speakers, as Bee doesn’t always know who is talking. During my conversation, I noticed that it had also omitted certain sections of our chat — nothing huge, but it wasn’t a complete account of everything that had been said. Bee 在总结对话方面做得相对不错，但该设备提供的实际转录文本有时会显得有些混乱。之前的评论者指出，你通常需要手动输入其他发言者的名字，因为 Bee 并不总能识别出是谁在说话。在我的测试中，我注意到它还遗漏了我们谈话中的某些部分——虽然不是什么大问题，但它确实没能完整记录下所有说过的话。

I also took Bee to my semi-weekly movie night with my friends and left it running throughout the night. Given the fact that we watched Reservoir Dogs, I was mildly afraid that the wearable would mistake all of the vulgar carnage for real-life bloodshed and potentially trigger some sort of internal alarm. However, Bee knew — basically — what was happening. The wearable figured out that we were watching a movie and, in the summary of events afterward, the wearable labeled the conversation “Tarantino Film Scene Analysis.” 我还带着 Bee 参加了朋友们的半周电影之夜，并让它整晚保持运行。考虑到我们看的是《落水狗》（Reservoir Dogs），我曾隐约担心该设备会把那些粗俗的杀戮误认为是现实中的流血事件，从而触发某种内部警报。然而，Bee 基本“理解”了正在发生的事情。它识别出我们在看电影，并在事后的事件摘要中将对话标记为“昆汀电影场景分析”。

While Bee shows early promise as a professional tool, I would not want this thing recording me in my personal life. Weirdly enough, Bee has largely been marketed as a product for personal use. To be comfortable with that, you have to be comfortable with Bee having access to a majority of both your offline and digital life. Indeed, to work well, Bee needs expansive mobile permissions — including access to your location, photos, phone contacts, calendar, and mobile notifications. 虽然 Bee 作为专业工具展现出了初步潜力，但我并不希望它记录我的个人生活。奇怪的是，Bee 在很大程度上被营销为一款个人用途的产品。要接受这一点，你就必须接受 Bee 能够访问你大部分的线下和数字生活。事实上，为了正常工作，Bee 需要广泛的移动权限——包括访问你的位置、照片、通讯录、日历和移动通知。

You can also share your health data with it — should you, for whatever reason, want it to know about your sleep patterns or your resting heart rate. The large accumulation of data Bee collects is stored in the cloud, which — again, for the digital privacy enthusiast — presents its own concerns. In a message to tech YouTuber Becca Farsace, Bee apparently unveiled a demo of the device running entirely locally. Were the company able to produce such a device, I would be thoroughly impressed — and might even consider buying one. That said, Amazon hasn’t offered any update on those plans. 你还可以与它共享健康数据——如果你出于某种原因想让它了解你的睡眠模式或静息心率。Bee 收集的大量数据存储在云端，这对于数字隐私爱好者来说，又引发了新的担忧。在给科技博主 Becca Farsace 的一条消息中，Bee 似乎展示了一个完全本地运行的设备演示。如果该公司能生产出这样的设备，我会非常佩服，甚至可能会考虑购买。不过，亚马逊尚未就这些计划提供任何更新。

As for Bee’s digital privacy protections, the company says that it offers encryption to protect user data — both at rest and in-transit. In its privacy policy, the company states that it has “implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information” that the company processes. Bee also claims that it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and employs continuous security monitoring. 至于 Bee 的数字隐私保护，该公司表示提供加密技术来保护用户数据——无论是静态存储还是传输中。在其隐私政策中，公司声明已“实施了旨在保护其处理的任何个人信息安全的技术和组织安全措施”。Bee 还声称其经过了“严格的第三方安全审计”，并采用了持续的安全监控。

That all sounds quite good, although it’s worth noting that Amazon — like many large tech companies — has been subject to the occasional data security issue or two (not exactly surprising for a company that governs as much of the global cloud environment as it does, but still). In short, Bee is a curious piece of hardware that, given some time and some tweaking, could have some promising professional applications further down the road. As a digital assistant for your personal life, however, it might prove to be a little too invasive for some users. 这些听起来都很不错，但值得注意的是，亚马逊——像许多大型科技公司一样——偶尔也会遇到一两个数据安全问题（对于一家掌控着如此多全球云环境的公司来说，这并不令人意外，但依然值得警惕）。简而言之，Bee 是一款令人好奇的硬件，如果经过一段时间的打磨和调整，它在未来可能会有不错的专业应用前景。然而，作为个人生活的数字助理，它对某些用户来说可能显得过于侵入性了。