The company is also unveiling the Bee Pro subscription plan today. For $11.99 a month, it offers some additional features like unlimited recent conversation summaries, suggested to-dos, daily memories, conversation templates, daily memories and a few new integrations that were also announced today.
Before I get into those, though, a quick note for existing Bee users. If you're feeling nervous as these sound like features you've been enjoying and you're concerned they might suddenly be wrested away and put behind a paywall, you might not be affected. Bee's founder Maria Zollo told me in a briefing that for the customers that have been with the company since its early days, "as a sign of gratitude, we're giving to them the Bee they have today." Zollo added that for them, the "entire featureset is free forever." (All new Bee customers also get 30 days of free Bee Pro use.)
If you want the features I'm about to mention, then you'll need a Pro subscription. First, the company is expanding its in-app integrations, which previously included Google Calendar, Gmail and Apple's HealthKit. It's introducing "the ability to connect to Alexa+ and Amazon.com." If you connect it to your Amazon account, your Bee can suggest items you might have mentioned in conversations that you wanted to purchase. These product recommendations will show up on Amazon's homepage, as well as in the Bee apps. You'll also be able to create custom shopping lists including things that came up in your conversations.
If you connect Bee to Alexa+, you can ask your Echo or other Alexa-enabled device for information that your Bee might know. This could be anything from conversation summaries, to-dos or book recommendations from friends. With this enabled, you won't have to hunt for and open the Bee app on your phone and ask for what you want — you can just ask your speaker or TV to do so. Amazon said that the Alexa devices would use voice identification to ascertain that it's you and not, say, a random interloper or nosy partner, before sharing the information.
Amazon stressed that both these features are opt-in, so the user has to give permission before information is shared.
Finally, Bee is launching a desktop app for Mac or Windows, which you can access with a Pro plan. This doesn't just give you access to your recaps and chats on your computer, but also allows you to do additional transcribing from the desktop. It's as full-featured as the mobile app.
A refresher on Bee Private Compute
Given the recent controversy around Apple's Audio Intelligence features — specifically Siri Recap and Live Rewind — it's worth bringing up Bee's "Private Compute." It's what the company described in a blog post on September 24 (about two weeks after the Apple launch) as a "secure and isolated processing environment that no one, including Amazon and Bee, can access." That's not to say this did not exist prior to the Apple event — the post does not make that very clear, other than saying that "Amazon and Bee developed Private Compute from the ground up, and the technology builds on the foundation of the AWS Nitro System and its AWS Nitro Trusted Platform Module."
In today's announcement, Amazon reiterated the tenets of Bee Private Compute, including reminders that no audio is ever stored. "Audio is processed into insights in real time and deleted after processing," the company said in a press release. It also said that no one can access your data unless you choose to share it, transcripts are encrypted using keys that can only be created and controlled by your device and that you can delete your transcripts and summaries whenever you want.