Why My Therapist Thinks I Should Chuck Amazon Bee Frontier Out the Window
A wearable that records conversations
Bee listens to conversations and uses AI to transcribe and summarize them. Its features include suggested to-dos, reflections on areas for growth, conversation summaries, and a chatbot that answers questions about what was said.
Over 19 months, the device has become better at separating the writer’s speech from television dialogue. It can also use calendar and photo information, and recommend Amazon purchases based on things the writer has said. For some work tasks, it has helped the writer recall talking points.
Memories and mistrust
The writer says therapy has focused in part on learning to trust personal memories. Growing up in an immigrant family where relatives disagreed about events left the writer unsure about whose account to believe; a parent’s eventual dementia made that uncertainty harder.
The writer once imagined that a device preserving conversations might help provide a reality check. Instead, seeing Bee’s versions of conversations has often felt destabilizing, because its transcripts and summaries can differ from the writer’s recollections.
Errors with real consequences
Bee has wrongly suggested that the writer frequently argues with a coworker’s spouse, although the writer has never met that person. It also attributed a belief about a family member’s mental health to the writer, and treated a joke about wearing good pants for video calls as sincere.
Some mistakes are amusing: Bee correctly separated the writer from fictional detectives in True Detective. But it has struggled with the nicknames used for the writer’s cats. After three weeks of discussing the device in therapy, the therapist asked the writer to get rid of it.
Key points
- Bee records conversations and turns them into transcripts, summaries, suggested tasks, and chatbot answers.
- The writer says Bee’s interpretations have made it harder to trust personal memories.
- The device has made errors about family, work, jokes, and the writer’s cats.
- After weeks of discussion, the writer’s therapist urged them to discard Bee.