Amazon's Bee AI wants to listen to your life, and then sell you things based on what you say

Amazon has found another way to make itself part of our everyday lives with its new Bee AI devices .

The Bees can record conversations and are pitched as a way to remember important details and translate plans into actions.

Naturally, those actions can include buying things from Amazon, making every casual conversation a potential shopping cart .

You can pay $75 or $100 for the privilege, depending on whether you choose the Bee Frontier, which clips to a wrist strap or clothes, or the Bee Eclipse, a magnetic smartphone attachment.

There are practical applications for something that remembers conversation details you might otherwise forget.

An assistant that recalls an appointment, prepares a follow-up email, or reminds you about a promise could save considerable time.

But Amazon's announcement also promises personalized shopping recommendations based on what Bee learns about you, which strikes me as a depressing, if inevitable destination for AI tools.

Of course, you might argue plenty of people have invited Amazon into their homes through Alexa devices.

Plus, Amazon already has a potentially huge amount of customer data from shopping histories, which lets it recommend products so well that it's a cliché joke to feel like you only have to mention a topic out loud for related items to show up in your recommendations.

That joke is an explicit feature of the new Bees.

Turning spoken conversations into another source of personalized assistance is supposed to appeal to potential customers.

The question is whether this is a bridge too far when it comes to allowing Amazon to eavesdrop on our lives to shape our shopping.

Idle chat becomes a shopping list (Image credit: Amazon) The idea of an AI assistant remembering what you say and not letting anything important slip through the cracks is enticing for the convenience it promises.

But imagine casually mentioning that your back hurts, your car is making a strange noise, or your child has developed an interest in dinosaurs.