Amazon's Wearable Gamble: The Future of B

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Amazon's Wearable Gamble – The Future of B

AI Hustle: Make Money from AI and ChatGPT, Midjourney, NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI
Hosts: Jaeden Schafer and Jamie McCauley
Date: January 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Amazon’s recent acquisition of B—a wearable hardware company—and what this move means for the future of AI-powered wearables. Hosts Jaeden Schafer and Jamie McCauley discuss their hands-on experience with the device, break down its current limitations, and theorize why Amazon made the acquisition despite those shortcomings. The conversation spans product usability, potential business strategies, smart home integration, privacy, and competition in the wearables market.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. What is B? First Impressions and Criticisms

Timestamp: 01:01 – 04:22

• What B Does:
  B is described as an Amazon-owned, $50 wearable—a wristband with a built-in microphone. Users must press a button to record audio, which is then transcribed (likely using a free, open-source model).
• User Experience:
  Jaeden expresses frustration with the current version, citing the need to manually activate the device, limited memory, poor audio pickup, and underwhelming transcription quality.
  • “In its current state and form B is a terrible product and I'm disappointed to say that because I would love to say that it was awesome.” – Jaeden (01:19)
  • Noted limitations include poor distance from mouth, lack of seamless integration, and questionable value due to required subscriptions (~$20/month).

2. Why Did Amazon Buy B?

Timestamp: 04:22 – 06:03

• Audio Data & Model Training:
  The speculation is that Amazon’s real play is the vast amount of diverse audio data B could collect, which benefits Alexa’s training and expansion.
  • “You can imagine they'll turn this into Alexa on your wrist is I think what their vision is for the product.” – Jaeden (05:17)
• Future Vision:
  The discussion shifts to a future where Alexa could be wearable and accessible beyond the home, potentially merging B’s hardware with Alexa’s ecosystem.

3. Use Cases and Value Propositions

Timestamp: 06:03 – 07:26

• Business Use:
  Jamie sees (if improved) B’s potential for business settings—mainly as an easy meeting notes tool, especially valuable for in-person scenarios often missed by other AI note-takers.
• Smart Home Integration:
  They hypothesize broader use—controlling smart home devices with commands on the go.
  • “You could be like, you know, preheat my oven to 425 and, you know, shut my lights off or unlock my house… kind of a cool function for some people in the future as well.” – Jamie (06:59)
• Security Concerns:
  The hosts raise concerns about wearables controlling critical home functions, citing risks if devices are stolen or voice authentication is spoofed.
  • “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… Unless it had vocal recognition…” – Jaeden (07:36)

4. Is there a Patent Play?

Timestamp: 08:42 – 09:40

• Jamie inquires if B owned any significant patents that would make the acquisition a strategic technology buy. Jaeden doubts it’s a proprietary technology acquisition, highlighting the ease of copying hardware and the likelihood of cheap knock-offs.
• Jaeden quotes B’s co-founder’s vision:
  • “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.” – Jaeden, quoting B’s co-founder (08:58)

5. Comparing Amazon’s Move to Meta’s Oculus Play

Timestamp: 09:40 – 11:16

• Jaeden draws parallels between Amazon’s acquisition and Meta’s earlier purchase of Oculus, noting that the VR platform was lackluster initially but paved the way for the successful Meta Ray-Ban AR collaboration.
  • “Amazon, I think, is basically copying Meta's play. When Meta bought Oculus… it was not that good when it first came out… and they did a lot of work and made it much better…” – Jaeden (09:58)
• Predicts Amazon will refine B, eventually fusing Alexa’s capabilities into wearables just as Meta evolved Oculus into broader AR applications.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Current Product:
  “Essentially… it is a very simple device to build… it literally is a microphone and it links up to probably OpenAI's transcribe model and that's their whole product.” – Jaeden (02:52)

• Meeting Note Use Case:
  “What those tools don’t do is in-person meetings... 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. And I think that’s probably where this tool would become useful.” – Jaeden (06:15)

• Security & Voice Cloning:
  “We’re kind of 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?” – Jaeden (08:16)

• On Amazon’s Strategy:
  “The fastest way they can do it is just with an audio direct tying into Alexa. And so they're going to 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.” – Jaeden (10:50)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:01 – Introduction to B and Jaeden’s experience
• 04:22 – Theorizing about Amazon’s motives
• 06:03 – Ideal use cases for businesses and smart home integration
• 07:26 – Security concerns and voice recognition discussion
• 08:42 – Patent talk and co-founder’s vision
• 09:40 – Comparison to Meta/Oculus acquisition
• 11:16 – Episode wrap-up

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Summary of Takeaways

• B, as it stands, is underwhelming and impractical for most users. Its transcription tech is basic, activation is clunky, and the value proposition unclear.
• Amazon’s acquisition is likely about long-term strategic positioning, not immediate value—possibly aiming to bring Alexa and AI-powered assistants beyond the home and into daily, wearable use cases.
• Business and productivity features (like in-person meeting note-taking) represent a practical future direction.
• Security, privacy, and the possibility of voice cloning attacks raise real concerns for wearable AI assistants.
• Amazon is copying Meta’s playbook, buying early/unfinished hardware as a foundation for future ecosystem dominance.

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For listeners interested in the intersection of AI, hardware, and entrepreneurship, this discussion provides a real-world, critical assessment of wearable tech’s growing pains and the strategic thinking behind big tech acquisitions.

Transcript

[A]

Twilio empowers the Builders who Shape Tomorrow Whether you're scaling a startup or transforming an enterprise, you need a customer engagement platform that keeps up. Twilio gives you the power to build, test and scale with confidence, connecting data, AI and customer communication into one seamless open system. No silos, no barriers, just everything you need to bring your biggest ideas to life. Learn [e-mail] whether you write code or shape strategy, if you build, you belong. Twilio's Customer Engagement platform is the ultimate toolbox for developers, designers, business leaders, and everyone in between looking to create truly memorable customer experiences. With Twilio, you can combine data, AI and real time communications in one open, flexible space so you can build without limits, without workarounds and without compromise. So what will you build today? Learn [e-mail] welcome back to the podcast.

[B]

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. Jaden 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?

[C]

I will say in its current state and form E 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 and 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 if 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 podcast studio.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. But 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 too, go check out the school community. It's linked in the description. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Bee from Amazon. So the thing that's really cool about BE is that it is essentially a little microphone on a wristband on your wrist. You, you have to push a button to enable it and 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 OpenAI'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. It has memory storage limits. You have to get the audio off of 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 OpenAI. 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. Um, 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 might have been like 20 bucks a month or something. And that's basically for ongoing usage support.

[B]

Right?

[C]

It's not that great of a product, but I have a couple theories on why Amazon bought it. Jamie, would you use something like this, like basically a wristband that records you?

[B]

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?

[C]

I mean, I've worn it a few times to test it out, but 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.

[B]

Your, from your mouth. Maybe that's why it doesn't record very well.

[C]

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. But 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 the, 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. Like 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.

[B]

Right.

[C]

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. And 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, like, 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.

[B]

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, 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.

[C]

And then I do have an interesting thought. Like, imagine if this was a portable Alexa, which would be sweet, right? 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. That 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 1 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 cloning tool and they could go like, get into my. Into my American Express. Now I've exposed myself, my American Express cards are all going to get hacked. Thanks, guys. Everyone. That'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?

[B]

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 for the technology for the future. You know, maybe they have other ideas as well.

[C]

Yes, I think so. This is what the. This is what the co founder said specifically about this. She said, we see each other as complimentary friends talking about Amazon and Alexa. 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 Amazon Alexa on your wrist everywhere you go. 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 summary, name recognition, they'd already built a product. Is this 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 would 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, like, and. 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 was 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. A lot of people buy it. And I think it's the future of augmented reality, virtual reality, basically. 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. 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 Ray band 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. So 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, the fastest way they can do it is just with an audio direct tying into Alexa. And so they're going to 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.

[B]

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. Those 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.

[A]

You bring the vision Twilio brings the platform. Real time messaging, AI driven insights, personalized customer journeys. It's all here, ready for you to build with. Twilio's Customer Engagement platform is flexible, open and designed for builders who want to create unforgettable customer experiences that drive impact. No silos, no compromises. Just the freedom to build your way. Twilio the ultimate Builder's toolbox learn [e-mail] Twilio empowers the builders who shape tomorrow. Whether you're scaling a startup or transforming an enterprise, you need a customer engagement platform that keeps up. Twilio gives you the power. Power to build, test and scale with confidence, connecting data, AI and customer communication into one seamless, open system. No silos, no barriers. Just everything you need to bring your biggest ideas to life. Learn more at Twilio. Com.