This AI Device ‘Remembers’ Your Life—But Gets Most of It Wrong

Sometimes a product review is so well-written that you feel like you were the one who experienced the abject misery of interfacing with a thing that is nowhere near capable of delivering on its promises. Such is Victoria Song’s review, published in The Verge, of a $50 wearable Fitbit-like device called a Bee.

Bee claims to be able to help you with your memory by snooping on you every second of your life. They’re finally putting the power of government surveillance in your own hands.

To be frank, the device sounds like a nightmare. It’s a little dystopic wearable device that you can wear around your wrist or pin to your shirt that listens in on all of your conversations. It can sift through your digital trail to make note of anything its AI deems significant.

Maybe Bee’s most disturbing feature, which also happens to be so poorly implemented that it’s hysterical, searches through conversations and presents little facts about you that you can then swipe left or right on like Tinder to determine whether it got the fact right or wrong.

This AI-Powered Wearable Memory Assistant Sounds Like a Nightmare

As someone with a horrendous memory whose wife cannot believe that simple facts just slip out of my brain as if they were never there, to begin with, Bee sounds like something that I might be interested in to help me retain more of my day-to-day experiences. Unfortunately, according to Song, the device can’t differentiate between your voice and anyone else’s, whether that person is a coworker, a family member, or a character on a TV show, rendering the whole thing mostly useless.

It also has a hard time understanding what is and isn’t something worth remembering, even if it is listening to you and only you. Song recounts a moment where she made a joke about how an upset stomach led to a messy toilet situation, which prompted Bee to suggest that she carry around Lactaid. “Life is hard enough. No one needs to be humbled by AI like this,” she wrote.

The more the device listened in on her day-to-day life, the more it started to write, as she calls it, fanfiction about her experiences, a lot of which were based on TV shows and music she was listening to. While watching an episode of Abbott Elementary, the Bee assumed the episode’s plot about a city bus strike that prevented students from attending school was a fact about Song that needed to be remembered and added to the larger texture of who she is.

We’re probably a way off from having Star Trek: The Next Generation-levels of digital personal assistants that do exactly what you want, how you want it, when you want it, with no error. Until then, we’re going to see a whole lot of Bees hitting the market—devices released long before the technology is ready for such complex and nuanced tasks.

For as useful as something like Bee could one day be, for now, it doesn’t seem that much different from carrying around an old-school tape recorder.