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Show Notes
Bundle tickets for AIE Summit NYC have now sold out. You can now sign up for the livestream — where we will be making a big announcement soon. NYC-based readers and Summit attendees should check out the meetups happening around the Summit.
2024 was a very challenging year for AI Hardware. After the buzz of CES last January, 2024 was marked by the meteoric rise and even harder fall of AI Wearables companies like Rabbit and Humane, with an assist from a pre-wallpaper-app MKBHD.
Even Friend.com, the first to launch in the AI pendant category, and which spurred Rewind AI to rebrand to Limitless and follow in their footsteps, ended up delaying their wearable ship date and launching an experimental website chatbot version.
We have been cautiously excited about this category, keeping tabs on most of the top entrants, including Omi and Compass.
However, to date the biggest winner still standing from the AI Wearable wars is Bee AI, founded by today's guests Maria and Ethan.
Bee is an always on hardware device with beamforming microphones, 7 day battery life and a mute button, that can be worn as a wristwatch or a clip-on pin, backed by an incredible transcription, diarization and very long context memory processing pipeline that helps you to remember your day, your todos, and even perform actions by operating a virtual cloud phone.
This is one of the most advanced, production ready, personal AI agents we've ever seen, so we were excited to be their first podcast appearance. We met Bee when we ran the world's first Personal AI meetup in April last year.
As a user of Bee (and not an investor! just a friend!) it’s genuinely been a joy to use, and we were glad to take advantage of the opportunity to ask hard questions about the privacy and legal/ethical side of things as much as the AI and Hardware engineering side of Bee. We hope you enjoy the episode and tune in next Friday for Bee’s first conference talk: Building Perfect Memory.
Full YouTube Video Version
Watch this for the live demo!
Show Notes
* Ethan Sutin, Maria de Lourdes Zollo
* Buy Bee with Listener Discount Code!
Timestamps
* 00:00:00 Introductions and overview of Bee Computer
* 00:01:58 Personal context and use cases for Bee
* 00:03:02 Origin story of Bee and the founders' background
* 00:06:56 Evolution from app to hardware device
* 00:09:54 Short-term value proposition for users
* 00:12:17 Demo of Bee's functionality
* 00:17:54 Hardware form factor considerations
* 00:22:22 Privacy concerns and legal considerations
* 00:30:57 User adoption and reactions to wearing Bee
* 00:35:56 CES experience and hardware manufacturing challenges
* 00:41:40 Software pipeline and inference costs
* 00:53:38 Technical challenges in real-time processing
* 00:57:46 Memory and personal context modeling
* 01:02:45 Social aspects and agent-to-agent interactions
* 01:04:34 Location sharing and personal data exchange
* 01:05:11 Personality analysis capabilities
* 01:06:29 Hiring and future of always-on AI
Transcript
Alessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of SmallAI.
swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very honored to have in the studio Maria and Ethan from Bee.
Maria [00:00:16]: Hi, thank you for having us.
swyx [00:00:20]: And you are, I think, the first hardware founders we've had on the podcast. I've been looking to have had a hardware founder, like a wearable hardware, like a wearable hardware founder for a while. I think we're going to have two or three of them this year. And you're the ones that I wear every day. So thank you for making Bee. Thank you for all the feedback and the usage. Yeah, you know, I've been a big fan. You are the speaker gift for the Engineering World's Fair. And let's start from the beginning. What is Bee Computer?
Ethan [00:00:52]: Bee Computer is a personal AI system. So you can think of it as AI living alongside you in first person. So it can kind of capture your in real life. So with that understanding can help you in significant ways. You know, the obvious one is memory, but that's that's really just the base kind of use case. So recalling and reflective. I know, Swyx, that you you like the idea of journaling, but you don't but still have some some kind of reflective summary of what you experienced in real life. But it's also about just having like the whole context of a human being and understanding, you know, giving the machine the ability to understand, like, what's going on in your life. Your attitudes, your desires, specifics about your preferences, so that not only can it help you with recall, but then anything that you need it to do, it already knows, like, if you think about like somebody who you've worked with or lived with for a long time, they just know kind of without having to ask you what you would want, it's clear that like, that is the future that personal AI, like, it's just going to be very, you know, the AI is just so much more valuable with personal context.
Maria [00:01:58]: I will say that one of the things that we are really passionate is really understanding this. Personal context, because we'll make the AI more useful. Think about like a best friend that know you so well. That's one of the things that we are seeing from the user. They're using from a companion standpoint or professional use cases. There are many ways to use B, but companionship and professional are the ones that we are seeing now more.
swyx [00:02:22]: Yeah. It feels so dry to talk about use cases. Yeah. Yeah.
Maria [00:02:26]: It's like really like investor question. Like, what kind of use case?
Ethan [00:02:28]: We're just like, we've been so broken and trained. But I mean, on the base case, it's just like, don't you want your AI to know everything you've said and like everywhere you've been, like, wouldn't you want that?
Maria [00:02:40]: Yeah. And don't stay there and repeat every time, like, oh, this is what I like. You already know that. And you do things for me based on that. That's I think is really cool.
swyx [00:02:50]: Great. Do you want to jump into a demo? Do you have any other questions?
Alessio [00:02:54]: I want to maybe just cover the origin story. Just how did you two meet? What was the was this the first idea you started working on? Was there something else before?
Maria [00:03:02]: I can start. So Ethan and I, we know each other from six years now. He had a company called Squad. And before that was called Olabot and was a personal AI. Yeah, I should. So maybe you should start this one. But yeah, that's how I know Ethan. Like he was pivoting from personal AI to Squad. And there was a co-watching with friends product. I had experience working with TikTok and video content. So I had the pivoting and we launched Squad and was really successful. And at the end. The founders decided to sell that to Twitter, now X. So both of us, we joined X. We launched Twitter Spaces. We launched many other products. And yeah, till then, we basically continue to work together to the start of B.
Ethan [00:03:46]: The interesting thing is like this isn't the first attempt at personal AI. In 2016, when I started my first company, it started out as a personal AI company. This is before Transformers, no BERT even like just RNNs. You couldn't really do any convincing dialogue at all. I met Esther, who was my previous co-founder. We both really interested in the idea of like having a machine kind of model or understand a dynamic human. We wanted to make personal AI. This was like more geared towards because we had obviously much limited tools, more geared towards like younger people. So I don't know if you remember in 2016, there was like a brief chatbot boom. It was way premature, but it was when Zuckerberg went up on F8 and yeah, M and like. Yeah. The messenger platform, people like, oh, bots are going to replace apps. It was like for about six months. And then everybody realized, man, these things are terrible and like they're not replacing apps. But it was at that time that we got excited and we're like, we tried to make this like, oh, teach the AI about you. So it was just an app that you kind of chatted with and it would ask you questions and then like give you some feedback.
Maria [00:04:53]: But Hugging Face first version was launched at the same time. Yeah, we started it.
Ethan [00:04:56]: We started out the same office as Hugging Face because Betaworks was our investor. So they had to think. They had a thing called Bot Camp. Betaworks is like a really cool VC because they invest in out there things. They're like way ahead of everybody else. And like back then it was they had something called Bot Camp. They took six companies and it was us and Hugging Face. And then I think the other four, I'm pretty sure, are dead. But and Hugging Face was the one that really got, you know, I mean, 30% success rate is pretty good. Yeah. But yeah, when we it was, it was like it was just the two founders. Yeah, they were kind of like an AI company in the beginning. It was a chat app for teenagers. A lot of people don't know that Hugging Face was like, hey, friend, how was school? Let's trade selfies. But then, you know, they built the Transformers library, I believe, to help them make their chat app better. And then they open sourced and it was like it blew up. And like they're like, oh, maybe this is the opportunity. And now they're Hugging Face. But anyway, like we were obsessed with it at that time. But then it was clear that there's some people who really love chatting and like answering questions. But it's like a lot of work, like just to kind of manually.
Maria [00:06:00]: Yeah.
Ethan [00:06:01]: Teach like all these things about you to an AI.
Maria [00:06:04]: Yeah, there were some people that were super passionate, for example, teenagers. They really like, for example, to speak about themselves a lot. So they will reply to a lot of questions and speak about them. But most of the people, they don't really want to spend time.
Ethan [00:06:18]: And, you know, it's hard to like really bring the value with it. We had like sentence similarity and stuff and could try and do, but it was like it was premature with the technology at the time. And so we pivoted. We went to YC and the long story, but like we pivoted to consumer video and that kind of went really viral and got a lot of usage quickly. And then we ended up selling it to Twitter, worked there and left before Elon, not related to Elon, but left Twitter.
swyx [00:06:46]: And then I should mention this is the famous time when well, when when Elon was just came in, this was like Esther was the famous product manager who slept there.
Ethan [00:06:56]: My co-founder, my former co-founder, she sleeping bag. She was the sleep where you were. Yeah, yeah, she stayed. We had left by that point.
swyx [00:07:03]: She very stayed, she's famous for staying.
Ethan [00:07:06]: Yeah, but later, later left or got, I think, laid off, laid off. Yeah, I think the whole product team got laid off. She was a product manager, director. But yeah, like we left before that. And then we're like, oh, my God, things are different now. You know, I think this is we really started working on again right before ChatGPT came out. But we had an app version and we kind of were trying different things around it. And then, you know, ultimately, it was clear that, like, there were some limitations we can go on, like a good question to ask any wearable company is like, why isn't this an app? Yes. Yeah. Because like.
Maria [00:07:40]: Because we tried the app at the beginning.
Ethan [00:07:43]: Yeah. Like the idea that it could be more of a and B comes from ambient. So like if it was more kind of just around you all the time and less about you having to go open the app and do the effort to, like, enter in data that led us down the path of hardware. Yeah. Because the sensors on this are microphones. So it's capturing and understanding audio. We started actually our first hardware with a vision component, too. And we can talk about why we're not doing that right now. But if you wanted to, like, have a continuous understanding of audio with your phone, it would monopolize your microphone. It would get interrupted by calls and you'd have to remember to turn it on. And like that little bit of friction is actually like a substantial barrier to, like, get your phone. It's like the experience of it just being with you all the time and like living alongside you. And so I think that that's like the key reason it's not an app. And in fact, we do have Apple Watch support. So anybody who has a watch, Apple Watch can use it right away without buying any hardware. Because we worked really hard to make a version for the watch that can run in the background, not super drain your battery. But even with the watch, there's still friction because you have to remember to turn it on and it still gets interrupted if somebody calls you. And you have to remember to. We send a notification, but you still have to go back and turn it on because it's just the way watchOS works.
Maria [00:09:04]: One of the things that we are seeing from our Apple Watch users, like I love the Apple Watch integration. One of the things that we are seeing is that people, they start using it from Apple Watch and after a couple of days they buy the B because they just like to wear it.
Ethan [00:09:17]: Yeah, we're seeing.
Maria [00:09:18]: That's something that like they're learning and it's really cool. Yeah.
Ethan [00:09:21]: I mean, I think like fundamentally we like to think that like a personal AI is like the mission. And it's more about like the understanding. Connecting the dots, making use of the data to provide some value. And the hardware is like the ears of the AI. It's not like integrating like the incoming sensor data. And that's really what we focus on. And like the hardware is, you know, if we can do it well and have a great experience on the Apple Watch like that, that's just great. I mean, but there's just some platform restrictions that like existing hardware makes it hard to provide that experience. Yeah.
Alessio [00:09:54]: What do people do in like two or three days that then convinces them to buy it? They buy the product. This feels like a product where like after you use it for a while, you have enough data to start to get a lot of insights. But it sounds like maybe there's also like a short term.
Maria [00:10:07]: From the Apple Watch users, I believe that because every time that you receive a call after, they need to go back to B and open it again. Or for example, every day they need to charge Apple Watch and reminds them to open the app every day. They feel like, okay, maybe this is too much work. I just want to wear the B and just keep it open and that's it. And I don't need to think about it.
Ethan [00:10:27]: I think they see the kind of potential of it just from the watch. Because even if you wear it a day, like we send a summary notification at the end of the day about like just key things that happened to you in your day. And like I didn't even think like I'm not like a journaling type person or like because like, oh, I just live the day. Why do I need to like think about it? But like it's actually pretty sometimes I'm surprised how interesting it is to me just to kind of be like, oh, yeah, that and how it kind of fits together. And I think that's like just something people get immediately with the watch. But they're like, oh, I'd like an easier watch. I'd like a better way to do this.
swyx [00:10:58]: It's surprising because I only know about the hardware. But I use the watch as like a backup for when I don't have the hardware. I feel like because now you're beamforming and all that, this is significantly better. Yeah, that's the other thing.
Ethan [00:11:11]: We have way more control over like the Apple Watch. You're limited in like you can't set the gain. You can't change the sample rate. There's just very limited framework support for doing anything with audio. Whereas if you control it. Then you can kind of optimize it for your use case. The Apple Watch isn't meant to be kind of recording this. And we can talk when we get to the part about audio, why it's so hard. This is like audio on the hardest level because you don't know it has to work in all environments or you try and make it work as best as it can. Like this environment is very great. We're in a studio. But, you know, afterwards at dinner in a restaurant, it's totally different audio environment. And there's a lot of challenges with that. And having really good source audio helps. But then there's a lot more. But with the machine learning that still is, you know, has to be done to try and account because like you can tune something for one environment or another. But it'll make one good and one bad. And like making something that's flexible enough is really challenging.
Alessio [00:12:10]: Do we want to do a demo just to set the stage? And then we kind of talk about.
Maria [00:12:14]: Yeah, I think we can go like a walkthrough and the prod.
Alessio [00:12:17]: Yeah, sure.
swyx [00:12:17]: So I think we said I should. So for listeners, we'll be switching to video. That was superimposed on. And to this video, if you want to see it, go to our YouTube, like and subscribe as always. Yeah.
Maria [00:12:31]: And by the bee. Yes.
swyx [00:12:33]: And by the bee. While you wait. While you wait. Exactly. It doesn't take long.
Maria [00:12:39]: Maybe you should have a discount code just for the listeners. Sure.
swyx [00:12:43]: If you want to offer it, I'll take it. All right. Yeah. Well, discount code Swyx. Oh s**t. Okay. Yeah. There you go.
Ethan [00:12:49]: An important thing to mention also is that the hardware is meant to work with the phone. And like, I think, you know, if you, if you look at rabbit or, or humane, they're trying to create like a new hardware platform. We think that the phone's just so dominant and it will be until we have the next generation, which is not going to be for five, you know, maybe some Orion type glasses that are cheap enough and like light enough. Like that's going to take a long time before with the phone rather than trying to just like replace it. So in the app, we have a summary of your days, but at the top, it's kind of what's going on now. And that's updating your phone. It's updating continuously. So right now it's saying, I'm discussing, you know, the development of, you know, personal AI, and that's just kind of the ongoing conversation. And then we give you a readable form. That's like little kind of segments of what's the important parts of the conversations. We do speaker identification, which is really important because you don't want your personal AI thinking you said something and attributing it to you when it was just somebody else in the conversation. So you can also teach it other people's voices. So like if some, you know, somebody close to you, so it can start to understand your relationships a little better. And then we do conversation end pointing, which is kind of like a task that didn't even exist before, like, cause nobody needed to do this. But like if you had somebody's whole day, how do you like break it into logical pieces? And so we use like not just voice activity, but other signals to try and split up because conversations are a little fuzzy. They can like lead into one, can start to the next. So also like the semantic content of it. When a conversation ends, we run it through larger models to try and get a better, you know, sense of the actual, what was said and then summarize it, provide key points. What was the general atmosphere and tone of the conversation and potential action items that might've come of that. But then at the end of the day, we give you like a summary of all your day and where you were and just kind of like a step-by-step walkthrough of what happened and what were the key points. That's kind of just like the base capture layer. So like if you just want to get a kind of glimpse or recall or reflect that's there. But really the key is like all of this is now like being influenced on to generate personal context about you. So we generate key items known to be true about you and that you can, you know, there's a human in the loop aspect is like you can, you have visibility. Right. Into that. And you can, you know, I have a lot of facts about technology because that's basically what I talk about all the time. Right. But I do have some hobbies that show up and then like, how do you put use to this context? So I kind of like measure my day now and just like, what is my token output of the day? You know, like, like as a human, how much information do I produce? And it's kind of measured in tokens and it turns out it's like around 200,000 or so a day. But so in the recall case, we have, um. A chat interface, but the key here is on the recall of it. Like, you know, how do you, you know, I probably have 50 million tokens of personal context and like how to make sense of that, make it useful. So I can ask simple, like, uh, recall questions, like details about the trip I was on to Taiwan, where recently we're with our manufacturer and, um, in real time, like it will, you know, it has various capabilities such as searching through your, your memories, but then also being able to search the web or look at my calendar, we have integrations with Gmail and calendars. So like connecting the dots between the in real life and the digital life. And, you know, I just asked it about my Taiwan trip and it kind of gives me the, the breakdown of the details, what happened, the issues we had around, you know, certain manufacturing problems and it, and it goes back and references the conversation so I can, I can go back to the source. Yeah.
Maria [00:16:46]: Not just the conversation as well, the integrations. So we have as well Gmail and Google calendar. So if there is something there that was useful to have more context, we can see that.
Ethan [00:16:56]: So like, and it can, I never use the word agentic cause it's, it's cringe, but like it can search through, you know, if I, if I'm brainstorming about something that spans across, like search through my conversation, search the email, look at the calendar and then depending on what's needed. Then synthesize, you know, something with all that context.
Maria [00:17:18]: I love that you did the Spotify wrapped. That was pretty cool. Yeah.
Ethan [00:17:22]: Like one thing I did was just like make a Spotify wrap for my 2024, like of my life. You can do that. Yeah, you can.
Maria [00:17:28]: Wait. Yeah. I like those crazy.
Ethan [00:17:31]: Make a Spotify wrapped for my life in 2024. Yeah. So it's like surprisingly good. Um, it like kind of like game metrics. So it was like you visited three countries, you shipped, you know, XMini, beta. Devices.
Maria [00:17:46]: And that's kind of more personal insights and reflection points. Yeah.
swyx [00:17:51]: That's fascinating. So that's the demo.
Ethan [00:17:54]: Well, we have, we can show something that's in beta. I don't know if we want to do it. I don't know.
Maria [00:17:58]: We want to show something. Do it.
Ethan [00:18:00]: And then we can kind of fit. Yeah.
Maria [00:18:01]: Yeah.
Ethan [00:18:02]: So like the, the, the, the vision is also like, not just about like AI being with you in like just passively understanding you through living your experience, but also then like it proactively suggesting things to you. Yeah. Like at the appropriate time. So like not just pool, but, but kind of, it can step in and suggest things to you. So, you know, one integration we have that, uh, is in beta is with WhatsApp. Maria is asking for a recommendation for an Italian restaurant. Would you like me to look up some highly rated Italian restaurants nearby and send her a suggestion?
Maria [00:18:34]: So what I did, I just sent to Ethan a message through WhatsApp in his own personal phone. Yeah.
Ethan [00:18:41]: So, so basically. B is like watching all my incoming notifications. And if it meets two criteria, like, is it important enough for me to raise a suggestion to the user? And then is there something I could potentially help with? So this is where the actions come into place. So because Maria is my co-founder and because it was like a restaurant recommendation, something that it could probably help with, it proposed that to me. And then I can, through either the chat and we have another kind of push to talk walkie talkie style button. It's actually a multi-purpose button to like toggle it on or off, but also if you push to hold, you can talk. So I can say, yes, uh, find one and send it to her on WhatsApp is, uh, an Android cloud phone. So it's, uh, going to be able to, you know, that has access to all my accounts. So we're going to abstract this away and the execution environment is not really important, but like we can go into technically why Android is actually a pretty good one right now. But, you know, it's searching for Italian restaurants, you know, and we don't have to watch this. I could be, you know, have my ear AirPods in and in my pocket, you know, it's going to go to WhatsApp, going to find Maria's thread, send her the response and then, and then let us know. Oh my God.
Alessio [00:19:56]: But what's the, I mean, an Italian restaurant. Yeah. What did it choose? What did it choose? It's easy to say. Real Italian is hard to play. Exactly.
Ethan [00:20:04]: It's easy to say. So I doubt it. I don't know.
swyx [00:20:06]: For the record, since you have the Italians, uh, best Italian restaurant in SF.
Maria [00:20:09]: Oh my God. I still don't have one. What? No.
Ethan [00:20:14]: I don't know. Successfully found and shared.
Alessio [00:20:16]: Let's see. Let's see what the AI says. Bottega. Bottega? I think it's Bottega.
Maria [00:20:21]: Have you been to Bottega? How is it?
Alessio [00:20:24]: It's fine.
Maria [00:20:25]: I've been to one called like Norcina, I think it was good.
Alessio [00:20:29]: Bottega is on Valencia Street. It's fine. The pizza is not good.
Maria [00:20:32]: It's not good.
Alessio [00:20:33]: Some of the pastas are good.
Maria [00:20:34]: You know, the people I'm sorry to interrupt. Sorry. But there is like this Delfina. Yeah. That here everybody's like, oh, Pizzeria Delfina is amazing. I'm overrated. This is not. I don't know. That's great. That's great.
swyx [00:20:46]: The North Beach Cafe. That place you took us with Michele last time. Vega. Oh.
Alessio [00:20:52]: The guy at Vega, Giuseppe, he's Italian. Which one is that? It's in Bernal Heights. Ugh. He's nice. He's not nice. I don't know that one. What's the name of the place? Vega. Vega. Vega. Cool. We got the name. Vega. But it's not Vega.
Maria [00:21:02]: It's Italian. What
swyx [00:21:10]: Vega. Vega.
swyx [00:21:16]: Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega.
Ethan [00:21:29]: Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega.
Ethan [00:21:40]: We're going to see a lot of innovation around hardware and stuff, but I think the real core is being able to do something useful with the personal context. You always had the ability to capture everything, right? We've always had recorders, camcorders, body cameras, stuff like that. But what's different now is we can actually make sense and find the important parts in all of that context.
swyx [00:22:04]: Yeah. So, and then one last thing, I'm just doing this for you, is you also have an API, which I think I'm the first developer against. Because I had to build my own. We need to hire a developer advocate. Or just hire AI engineers. The point is that you should be able to program your own assistant. And I tried OMI, the former friend, the knockoff friend, and then real friend doesn't have an API. And then Limitless also doesn't have an API. So I think it's very important to own your data. To be able to reprocess your audio, maybe. Although, by default, you do not store audio. And then also just to do any corrections. There's no way that my needs can be fully met by you. So I think the API is very important.
Ethan [00:22:47]: Yeah. And I mean, I've always been a consumer of APIs in all my products.
swyx [00:22:53]: We are API enjoyers in this house.
Ethan [00:22:55]: Yeah. It's very frustrating when you have to go build a scraper. But yeah, it's for sure. Yeah.
swyx [00:23:03]: So this whole combination of you have my location, my calendar, my inbox. It really is, for me, the sort of personal API.
Alessio [00:23:10]: And is the API just to write into it or to have it take action on external systems?
Ethan [00:23:16]: Yeah, we're expanding it. It's right now read-only. In the future, very soon, when the actions are more generally available, it'll be fully supported in the API.
Alessio [00:23:27]: Nice. I'll buy one after the episode.
Ethan [00:23:30]: The API thing, to me, is the most interesting. Yeah. We do have real-time APIs, so you can even connect a socket and connect it to whatever you want it to take actions with. Yeah. It's too smart for me.
Alessio [00:23:43]: Yeah. I think when I look at these apps, and I mean, there's so many of these products, we launch, it's great that I can go on this app and do things. But most of my work and personal life is managed somewhere else. Yeah. So being able to plug into it. Integrate that. It's nice. I have a bunch of more, maybe, human questions. Sure. I think maybe people might have. One, is it good to have instant replay for any argument that you have? I can imagine arguing with my wife about something. And, you know, there's these commercials now where it's basically like two people arguing, and they're like, they can throw a flag, like in football, and have an instant replay of the conversation. I feel like this is similar, where it's almost like people cannot really argue anymore or, like, lie to each other. Because in a world in which everybody adopts this, I don't know if you thought about it. And also, like, how the lies. You know, all of us tell lies, right? How do you distinguish between when I'm, there's going to be sometimes things that contradict each other, because I might say something publicly, and I might think something, really, that I tell someone else. How do you handle that when you think about building a product like this?
Maria [00:24:48]: I would say that I like the fact that B is an objective point of view. So I don't care too much about the lies, but I care more about the fact that can help me to understand what happened. Mm-hmm. And the emotions in a really objective way, like, really, like, critical and objective way. And if you think about humans, they have so many emotions. And sometimes something that happened to me, like, I don't know, I would feel, like, really upset about it or really angry or really emotional. But the AI doesn't have those emotions. It can read the conversation, understand what happened, and be objective. And I think the level of support is the one that I really like more. Instead of, like, oh, did this guy tell me a lie? I feel like that's not exactly, like, what I feel. I find it curious for me in terms of opportunity.
Alessio [00:25:35]: Is the B going to interject in real time? Say I'm arguing with somebody. The B is like, hey, look, no, you're wrong. What? That person actually said.
Ethan [00:25:43]: The proactivity is something we're very interested in. Maybe not for, like, specifically for, like, selling arguments, but more for, like, and I think that a lot of the challenge here is, you know, you need really good reasoning to kind of pull that off. Because you don't want it just constantly interjecting, because that would be super annoying. And you don't want it to miss things that it should be interjecting. So, like, it would be kind of a hard task even for a human to be, like, just come in at the right times when it's appropriate. Like, it would take the, you know, with the personal context, it's going to be a lot better. Because, like, if somebody knows about you, but even still, it requires really good reasoning to, like, not be too much or too little and just right.
Maria [00:26:20]: And the second part about, well, like, some things, you know, you say something to somebody else, but after I change my mind, I send something. Like, it's every time I have, like, different type of conversation. And I'm like, oh, I want to know more about you. And I'm like, oh, I want to know more about you. I think that's something that I found really fascinating. One of the things that we are learning is that, indeed, humans, they evolve over time. So, for us, one of the challenges is actually understand, like, is this a real fact? Right. And so far, what we do is we give, you know, to the, we have the human in the loop that can say, like, yes, this is true, this is not. Or they can edit their own fact. For sure, in the future, we want to have all of that automatized inside of the product.
Ethan [00:26:57]: But, I mean, I think your question kind of hits on, and I know that we'll talk about privacy, but also just, like, if you have some memory and you want to confirm it with somebody else, that's one thing. But it's for sure going to be true that in the future, like, not even that far into the future, that it's just going to be kind of normalized. And we're kind of in a transitional period now. And I think it's, like, one of the key things that is for us to kind of navigate that and make sure we're, like, thinking of all the consequences. And how to, you know, make the right choices in the way that everything's designed. And so, like, it's more beneficial than it could be harmful. But it's just too valuable for your AI to understand you. And so if it's, like, MetaRay bands or the Google Astra, I think it's just people are going to be more used to it. So people's behaviors and expectations will change. Whether that's, like, you know, something that is going to happen now or in five years, it's probably in that range. And so, like, I think we... We kind of adapt to new technologies all the time. Like, when the Ring cameras came out, that was kind of quite controversial. It's like... But now it's kind of... People just understand that a lot of people have cameras on their doors. And so I think that...
Maria [00:28:09]: Yeah, we're in a transitional period for sure.
swyx [00:28:12]: I will press on the privacy thing because that is the number one thing that everyone talks about. Obviously, I think in Silicon Valley, people are a little bit more tech-forward, experimental, whatever. But you want to go mainstream. You want to sell to consumers. And we have to worry about this stuff. Baseline question. The hardest version of this is law. There are one-party consent states where this is perfectly legal. Then there are two-party consent states where they're not. What have you come around to this on?
Ethan [00:28:38]: Yeah, so the EU is a totally different regulatory environment. But in the U.S., it's basically on a state-by-state level. Like, in Nevada, it's single-party. In California, it's two-party. But it's kind of untested. You know, it's different laws, whether it's a phone call, whether it's in person. In a state like California, it's two-party. Like, anytime you're in public, there's no consent comes into play because the expectation of privacy is that you're in public. But we process the audio and nothing is persisted. And then it's summarized with the speaker identification focusing on the user. Now, it's kind of untested on a legal, and I'm not a lawyer, but does that constitute the same as, like, a recording? So, you know, it's kind of a gray area and untested in law right now. I think that the bigger question is, you know, because, like, if you had your Ray-Ban on and were recording, then you have a video of something that happened. And that's different than kind of having, like, an AI give you a summary that's focused on you that's not really capturing anybody's voice. You know, I think the bigger question is, regardless of the legal status, like, what is the ethical kind of situation with that? Because even in Nevada that we're—or many other U.S. states where you can record. Everything. And you don't have to have consent. Is it still, like, the right thing to do? The way we think about it is, is that, you know, we take a lot of precautions to kind of not capture personal information of people around. Both through the speaker identification, through the pipeline, and then the prompts, and the way we store the information to be kind of really focused on the user. Now, we know that's not going to, like, satisfy a lot of people. But I think if you do try it and wear it again. It's very hard for me to see anything, like, if somebody was wearing a bee around me that I would ever object that it captured about me as, like, a third party to it. And like I said, like, we're in this transitional period where the expectation will just be more normalized. That it's, like, an AI. It's not capturing, you know, a full audio recording of what you said. And it's—everything is fully geared towards helping the person kind of understand their state and providing valuable information to them. Not about, like, logging details about people they encounter.
Alessio [00:30:57]: You know, I've had the same question also with the Zoom meeting transcribers thing. I think there's kind of, like, the personal impact that there's a Firefly's AI recorder. Yeah. I just know that it's being recorded. It's not like a—I don't know if I'm going to say anything different. But, like, intrinsically, you kind of feel—because it's not pervasive. And I'm curious, especially, like, in your investor meetings. Do people feel differently? Like, have you had people ask you to, like, turn it off? Like, in a business meeting, to not record? I'm curious if you've run into any of these behaviors.
Maria [00:31:29]: You know what's funny? On my end, I wear it all the time. I take my coffee, a blue bottle with it. Or I work with it. Like, obviously, I work on it. So, I wear it all the time. And so far, I don't think anybody asked me to turn it off. I'm not sure if because they were really friendly with me that they know that I'm working on it. But nobody really cared.
swyx [00:31:48]: It's because you live in SF.
Maria [00:31:49]: Actually, I've been in Italy as well. Uh-huh. And in Italy, it's a super privacy concern. Like, Europe is a super privacy concern. And again, they're nothing. Like, it's—I don't know. Yeah. That, for me, was interesting.
Ethan [00:32:01]: I think—yeah, nobody's ever asked me to turn it off, even after giving them full demos and disclosing. I think that some people have said, well, my—you know, in a personal relationship, my partner initially was, like, kind of uncomfortable about it. We heard that from a few users. And that was, like, more in just, like— It's not like a personal relationship situation. And the other big one is people are like, I do like it, but I cannot wear this at work. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, I think I will get in trouble based on policies or, like, you know, if you're wearing it inside a research lab or something where you're working on things that are kind of sensitive that, like—you know, so we're adding certain features like geofencing, just, like, at this location. It's just never active.
swyx [00:32:50]: I mean, I've often actually explained to it the other way, where maybe you only want it at work, so you never take it from work. And it's just a work device, just like your Zoom meeting recorder is a work device.
Ethan [00:33:09]: Yeah, professionals have been a big early adopter segment. And you say in San Francisco, but we have out there our daily shipment of over 100. If you go look at the addresses, Texas, I think, is our biggest state, and Florida, just the biggest states. A lot of professionals who talk for, and we didn't go out to build it for that use case, but I think there is a lot of demand for white-collar people who talk for a living. And I think we're just starting to talk with them. I think they just want to be able to improve their performance around, understand what they were doing.
Alessio [00:33:47]: How do you think about Gong.io? Some of these, for example, sales training thing, where you put on a sales call and then it coaches you. They're more verticalized versus having more horizontal platform.
Ethan [00:33:58]: I am not super familiar with those things, because like I said, it was kind of a surprise to us. But I think that those are interesting. I've seen there's a bunch of them now, right? Yeah. It kind of makes sense. I'm terrible at sales, so I could probably use one. But it's not my job, fundamentally. But yeah, I think maybe it's, you know, we heard also people with restaurants, if they're able to understand, if they're doing well.
Maria [00:34:26]: Yeah, but in general, I think a lot of people, they like to have the double check of, did I do this well? Or can you suggest me how I can do better? We had a user that was saying to us that he used for interviews. Yeah, he used job interviews. So he used B and after asked to the B, oh, actually, how do you think my interview went? What I should do better? And I like that. And like, oh, that's actually like a personal coach in a way.
Alessio [00:34:50]: Yeah. But I guess the question is like, do you want to build all of those use cases? Or do you see B as more like a platform where somebody is going to build like, you know, the sales coach that connects to B so that you're kind of the data feed into it?
Ethan [00:35:02]: I don't think this is like a data feed, more like an understanding kind of engine and like definitely. In the future, having third parties to the API and building out for all the different use cases is something that we want to do. But the like initial case we're trying to do is like build that layer for all that to work. And, you know, we're not trying to build all those verticals because no startup could do that well. But I think that it's really been quite fascinating to see, like, you know, I've done consumer for a long time. Consumer is very hard to predict, like, what's going to be. It's going to be like the thing that's the killer feature. And so, I mean, we really believe that it's the future, but we don't know like what exactly like process it will take to really gain mass adoption.
swyx [00:35:50]: The killer consumer feature is whatever Nikita Beer does. Yeah. Social app for teens.
Ethan [00:35:56]: Yeah, well, I like Nikita, but, you know, he's good at building bootstrap companies and getting them very viral. And then selling them and then they shut down.
swyx [00:36:05]: Okay, so you just came back from CES.
Maria [00:36:07]: Yeah, crazy. Yeah, tell us. It was my first time in Vegas and first time CES, both of them were overwhelming.
swyx [00:36:15]: First of all, did you feel like you had to do it because you're in consumer hardware?
Maria [00:36:19]: Then we decided to be there and to have a lot of partners and media meetings, but we didn't have our own booth. So we decided to just keep that. But we decided to be there and have a presence there, even just us and speak with people. It's very hard to stand out. Yeah, I think, you know, it depends what type of booth you have. I think if you can prepare like a really cool booth.
Ethan [00:36:41]: Have you been to CES?
Maria [00:36:42]: I think it can be pretty cool.
Ethan [00:36:43]: It's massive. It's huge. It's like 80,000, 90,000 people across the Venetian and the convention center. And it's, to me, I always wanted to go just like...
Maria [00:36:53]: Yeah, you were the one who was like...
swyx [00:36:55]: I thought it was your idea.
Ethan [00:36:57]: I always wanted to go just as a, like, just as a fan of...
Maria [00:37:01]: Yeah, you wanted to go anyways.
Ethan [00:37:02]: Because like, growing up, I think CES like kind of peaked for a while and it was like, oh, I want to go. That's where all the cool, like... gadgets, everything. Yeah, now it's like SmartBitch and like, you know, vacuuming the picks up socks. Exactly.
Maria [00:37:13]: There are a lot of cool vacuums. Oh, they love it.
swyx [00:37:15]: They love the Roombas, the pick up socks.
Maria [00:37:16]: And pet tech. Yeah, yeah. And dog stuff.
swyx [00:37:20]: Yeah, there's a lot of like robot stuff. New TVs, new cars that never ship. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking like last year, this time last year was when Rabbit and Humane launched at CES and Rabbit kind of won CES. And now this year, no wearables except for you guys.
Ethan [00:37:32]: It's funny because it's obviously it's AI everything. Yeah. Like every single product. Yeah.
Maria [00:37:37]: Toothbrush with AI, vacuums with AI. Yeah. Yeah.
Ethan [00:37:41]: We like hair blow, literally a hairdryer with AI. We saw.
Maria [00:37:45]: Yeah, that was cool.
Ethan [00:37:46]: But I think that like, yeah, we