If you thought AI was already almost indispensable, watch out, because now you can wear a gadget designed to record everything you hear and say, and using artificial intelligence, distill it down to a handy summary. These devices promise to give you perfect recall of every conversation. Record every meeting. Settle arguments. Make a to-do list plucked out of your conversations, seemingly like magic. That’s what the best AI wearables like the Bee Pioneer Edition and Plaud NotePin promise, anyway.
AI wearables like Bee, Plaud NotePin, Omi and Limitless promise to streamline your life by recording and summarizing your day.
Illustration: Forbes / Photo: Dave Johnson for Forbes
I tested all of the AI wearables you can buy right now—Bee, Plaud Pin, Omi and Limitless Pendant—for a full month. When you think of these gadgets, some people might imagine an episode of Black Mirror. But the reality was that they proved to be surprisingly helpful. What’s it like to wear a device that takes detailed notes on your every waking moment and shares the highlights back with you at your leisure? Read on to see what I thought of each of these products.
AI Recording Wearables, At A Glance:
Let’s not bury the lede—here are the best reasons to buy each of these products:
- Bee Pioneer Edition: A great way to get your feet wet in the world of AI wearables; works far better than you have any right to expect for $50, and there’s no monthly subscription fee.
- Plaud NotePin: Superb summaries, transcriptions and mind maps, though you’ll need to turn it on and off throughout the day. Even so, it’s my favorite for the workplace.
- Limitless Pendant: With short, bulleted summaries that expand into the actual transcription for details, Limitless is probably too concise and not helpful enough for some people.
- Omi: Good summaries with a strong emphasis on its app ecosystem and future extendibility. This gadget has a ton of potential, though I do worry a little about its data privacy.
Read on to see what I thought about each one of these AI pendants.
Dimensions: Pill-shaped, 1.8 x 0.8 inches | Charging: USB-C | Data and Security: Not HIPAA compliant, raw audio deleted immediately | Wear style: Clip on, wristband | Recording mode: All day/lifelogging | Battery life: Seven days
Pros:
- Elegant UI that shows to-dos and summarizes your day as well as individual meetings and conversations
- Ridiculously inexpensive with no ongoing subscription
- Always on (unless you mute it)
- A full week of battery life
Cons:
- You have to approve every to-do and fact about yourself; fall behind and it becomes unmanageable
- Frequently hallucinates or misunderstands the details of conversations and meetings
- Right now, iPhone only (Android reportedly coming soon)
You can wear the Bee as a pendant—it comes with a clip you can pin to your clothing—or around your wrist like a fitness band. Aside from a mute button, there are no controls on the Bee itself; it just sits in the background, listening and recording. (Unlike the other AI pendants, Bee lights up when muted; all the others display a light when recording.)
Like the other AI wearables I tried, all the action happens in the mobile app. Right now, it’s only compatible with iPhone, though an Android version is reportedly coming soon. The app displays daily summaries and suggests to-dos based on what it has heard. You can also use the chat mode to ask Bee questions, like “what day did we agree to go see the new Superman movie?” or “what tasks did my team want to give to the new hire?” That’s an important feature; Bee knows a lot more about your day than you’ll find in the summary, so if you want to know something specific, just ask.
Bee writes almost poetic summaries of your day.
Dave Johnson For Forbes
Among all the wearables, Bee tries the hardest to make you the hero of your personal story. It paints a picture of your day with an effusive headline (one of mine: “A day of home, dogs, cars, media, and shared moments with loved ones, punctuated by humor and affection”) and then waxes poetically about your day in the overview. For example: “Your day was a vibrant mix of personal routines, dog care, and a deep engagement with a variety of people whom you work with.” You get “key takeaways”—a bulleted list of the most important events—“atmosphere,” which describes the emotional tone of the day, and summaries of each major meeting and event throughout the day, arranged chronologically with time stamps. The transcript tab offers snippets of dialog throughout the day, organized by topic.
But Bee can be more trouble than it’s worth. It hordes suggested to-dos that you need to manually approve one-by-one to move to the actual to-do tab, and I routinely get dozens of suggestions each day—many of which are teased out of entertainment content that Bee has mistaken for things I said. If you miss a day or two, things spiral out of control and you may have hundreds of suggested to-dos to wade through, enough to make me want to declare AI bankruptcy and toss Bee into a drawer forever.
Right now, Bee is only compatible with iPhone, though an Android version is reportedly coming soon.
Dave Johnson For Forbes
Likewise, it collects facts about me, which I have to review as well. Not only are many of these facts also mistakenly pulled from TV shows, podcasts, and other people I’ve talked to (“Dave is a criminal lawyer,” “Dave has previously worked at a rehabilitation center,” “Dave’s full name is David Elfman,”), but it offers contradictory facts from one day to the next, suggesting it isn’t internalizing its own data—and it’s entirely unclear what purpose this fact collection is supposed to serve, anyway. Bee doesn’t seem to use any of these facts to improve the way it processes information about me, which makes the whole exercise of reviewing these facts seem pointless. On the plus side, for Severance fans, it feels like Bee is telling you facts about your outie.
Speaking of AI hallucinations, Bee isn’t good at knowing who is speaking at any given moment or outright thinks additional people were present for conversations. The good news is that while this is often amusing or perplexing, it generally doesn’t affect the usefulness of the summaries it provides.
Bottom line: Bee is remarkable. It’s roughly as good as the competition for a fraction of the price, and now that one of the other gadgets I tried, Omi, has moved to a subscription model, it’s the only pendant that doesn’t have an ongoing fee to pay each month. More than once I’ve used it to win a bet by proving what I said days earlier. It’s a somewhat reliable note-taker in meetings (even though it doesn’t know who’s speaking). I listen to a lot of podcasts, and sometimes it knows I’m listening to content, sometimes it doesn’t. But all this is likely to improve with software updates, so for a first-generation device with a fire-sale price, color me thoroughly impressed.
Dimensions: Button shaped, 1.9 x 0.7 inches | Charging: Proprietary dock | Data and Security: HIPAA compliant, end-to-end data encryption | Wear style: Magnetic clip, optional wristband or lanyard | Recording mode: Per meeting | Battery life: 3-4 days, depending on how many meetings you record
Pros:
- Uses ChatGPT and Claude for excellent, accurate and multi-lingual transcriptions
- Delivers the most immediately readable and useful summaries for each meeting and conversation
- Preserves original recordings as well as transcripts and summaries
- You can choose from summary templates for different professionals and applications
Cons:
- Most expensive wearable and requires an ongoing subscription
- No overall to-do tracking like some AI wearables, though each meeting lists action items
- You need to activate it for specific conversations—isn’t always on
- Need to wait for recordings to transfer to your phone before summaries are available
The Plaud NotePin is different than the other wearables in this roundup in two important ways. First, it’s not designed to be an always-on, life-logging device, capturing everything it hears all day long. Instead, you press the NotePin until it vibrates (and a small recording light comes on) to start capturing a specific meeting or conversation, and then press again to stop when the meeting is over.
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Dave Johnson for Forbes
Secondly, while other gadgets emphasize their summaries, Plaud makes it super easy to access the original audio recordings as well as complete, aesthetically formatted transcripts in addition to excellent summaries—plus a visual tree-like mind map that organizes the topics from your conversation in a smart and visually engaging way. In fact, Plaud should be applauded for the elegance and usability of its app. And of course, you can use the Ask AI chat window to extract and synthesize information from the conversation as well.
The NotePin is clearly optimized for professionals who need to capture details of interactions with co-workers or clients in vivid detail. Plaud includes an ecosystem of summary templates, which you can choose depending on the kind of meeting or conversation you need to transcribe. The default summary template is excellent and was all I needed for my day-to-day needs, but you can also choose templates created by a Plaud developer community for class lectures, job interviews, construction project meetings and medical sessions (like psychotherapy notes and and medical consultations).
The Plaud NotePin’s summary is excellent but you also get full transcripts and original audio as well.
Dave Johnson For Forbes
Out of the box, Plaud doesn’t automatically transcribe and summarize its recordings; I found that I had to select recently uploaded conversations and ask the app to create a summary. This is because Plaud ties its device to a subscription service—if you don’t have the unlimited plan ($240 per year) then you may need to be selective about which conversations you transcribe and summarize. You can buy 1,200 minutes per month for $99.
If you do have the unlimited plan—or you’re not otherwise worried about running out of minutes—then AutoFlow is a cool feature. AutoFlow is automation you can use to automatically perform certain tasks. I was able to tell NotePin to automatically transcribe and summarize every conversation, for example, and that’s just for starters. I found you could transcribe only conversations with certain keywords, apply specific summary templates based on the kind of conversation, and optionally send emails when the transcription is complete.
In many ways, Plaud seems like the most mature of the AI wearables. While it isn’t intended for always-on recording—something all the other gadgets are designed to do—its polished interface and community ecosystem of summary templates and potential integrations suggests it’s a formidable product.
Dimensions: Button shaped, 1.2 x 0.5 inches | Charging: USB-C | Data and Security: HIPAA compliant, private and secure data | Wear style: Magnetic clip | Recording mode: All day/lifelogging | Battery life: Roughly two days
Pros:
- Bulleted summaries accompanied by transcriptions good for encapsulating meetings
- Learns voices to distinguish speakers
- Subscription tiers include free (20 hours/month) service
- Always on (unless you mute it)
Cons:
- You don’t get thorough summaries—you need to crawl through transcriptions for detailed notes about meetings
- Hyper-focused on summarizing meetings; you don’t get to-dos or broad recaps of the day
Limitless looks like what you get if you connect a pair of Apple Airtags with a rubber hinge. The two discs stick together magnetically, so you can clip the pendant over clothes—but if you prefer, you can slip it onto a lanyard and wear it around your neck. That’s my preference, because the magnet isn’t especially powerful and more than once it slipped off my shirt. It has a side button you can use to start and stop recording.
Like most of the products in this roundup, Limitless is designed to listen in the background all day long. Throughout the day, it uploads your conversations to the phone and groups your summaries with descriptive titles and timestamps for easy reference.
Limitless has very succinct summaries which are not as helpful as some other AI wearables.
Dave Johnson for Forbes
Limitless organizes your conversations a little differently than other AI pendants: Within each conversation, Limitless creates a set of nested bullet points, breaking events into chunks. For example, Limitless divided an hour-long lunch chat into short 15-minute segments and entitled one, “A wide-ranging conversation about electric cars, including selling a Tesla, renting a Nissan, and the politics of tax credits.” Within that summary are a half dozen bullets summarizing part of the conversation, like: “Recounting a recent attempt to sell a Tesla” and “Frustration with a rented Nissan key fob and tire pressure.” Expand each of those bullets, and you get the actual transcribed conversations, divided by timestamp and speaker. It’s a no-nonsense, utilitarian way to encapsulate your day, but it’s not as fun to read as Bee or as elegantly organized as Plaud. And the info isn’t really summarized in the same way as, say Bee or Plaud. Some may appreciate the brevity, but I found relying on Limitless to be a lot of work. Of course, you can use the chat tab to ask the Limitless AI to find and summarize anything it has recorded.
Unlike the other apps, which present each day one after the other in an infinite scroll, Limitless puts each day on its own page. You can swipe pages to change days, or tap a calendar to zip right to a specific date.
The two discs stick together magnetically, so you can clip the pendant over clothes—but if you prefer, you can slip it onto a lanyard and wear it around your neck.
Dave Johnson For Forbes
The app has a ton of customization features—language, a custom word dictionary, how long to keep audio clips and much more. In theory, it also learns your voice, so it knows when you are speaking and can pick you out of a group conversation. You can also teach it other voices it’ll commonly hear, like coworkers, friends and family. All that said, I didn’t see it clearly understanding it was me when I was speaking throughout testing—but hopefully it’ll get better at that over time.
Limitless gets pricey, though. The pendant has a one-time cost of $199 and comes with 20 hours per month of usage for free. You’ll probably burn through that pretty fast, though. It’s designed to be on all day long. A better bet is the Pro subscription (100 hours per month) for $19 per month, or the unlimited plan for $29 per month.
Dimensions: Button shaped, 1.1 x 0.4 inches | Charging: Proprietary dock | Data and Security: Not HIPAA compliant, encryption at rest and in transit, secure storage | Wear style: Lanyard | Recording mode: All day/lifelogging | Battery life: One day
Pros:
- Exciting ecosystem of apps to process your recordings in different ways
- Learns voices to distinguish speakers
- Automatically collects relevant to-dos from your conversations
- Always on (unless you mute it)
Cons:
- The transition from a free service to $20/month subscription
- Reasonable concerns about the privacy and security of the apps and integrations
I find Omi utterly fascinating. While the app is similar to Bee—it summarizes your conversations while also extracting to-dos and various facts—it is the most future-facing of the AI pendants you can buy today. That’s because Omi’s parent company, Based Hardware, has built an open ecosystem of apps—essentially, plugins for the Omi app—that let you synthesize and manipulate your recordings in all sorts of cool and unexpected ways.
In addition to the standard summarizer, there are hundreds of other options you can select, such as a cognitive bias detector (which gives recommendations for more objective thinking), a mentor app that dispenses advice about your conversations, a “lie detector,” a joke extractor that sniffs out humor in your day and many others. Don’t expect all of these apps to be gems, but the fact that Based Hardware is laying the groundwork for this kind of integration is really exciting. On the other hand, to use these apps, you need to give third party developers access to your personal data, which could be alarming to some.
The Omi pendant is shaped like a fat coin (about a half-inch thick) and is meant to be worn around your neck on a lanyard. A button starts or stops recording, but you can leave it running all day long.
Omi’s summaries are good, but the availability of additional plug-in apps gives you a lot of flexibility.
Dave Johnson For Forbes
The UI is a bit more minimalist than some of the competing AI pendants, but even so, the summaries are fun to read. Each one starts with a broad summary (and weirdly, the greeting, “hey now”), along with sections for the mood of the activity, action items, key takeaways, questions raised and funny or ‘otherwise’ notable quotes (like when Omi caught my fiancé in a rare moment admitting an error, saying: “‘You’re right. We should’ve turned right.’ — Beth.”)
In keeping with the more minimalist approach, transcripts are a little harder to get to. There’s no way to see them directly in the app, though you can use a menu to export them, such as via email. Need more information than you can find in the summaries? Use the AI chat.
The Omi pendant is shaped like a fat coin (about a half-inch thick) and is meant to be worn around your neck on a lanyard.
Dave Johnson for Forbes
I really like the fact that Omi confidently creates a pretty effective to-do list without forcing me to approve each one, like the overly-cautiously Bee. On the other hand, Omi’s fact collector—which seems similar to Bee’s—is weird in a different way. Its facts are referred to as “memories,” and there’s no apparent rhyme or reason for why Omi selects the ones that it does. Memories are a crazy combination of things I’ve personally said, other people have said, and things it overheard media saying. Aarav Garg, one of Omi’s founders, told me that the long term plan is for Omi to use these facts to build sophisticated understanding of the user and its environment, but they don’t appear to do much, if anything, at the moment. Moreover, like Limitless, Omi promises to learn both your own voice and those of others, though in my experience Omi couldn’t reliably tell me apart from others in practice.
AI Recording Wearables, In Summary
There are already no fewer than four AI wearables on the market, giving you a lot of choice if you want to clip a recorder to your shirt and let artificial intelligence keep track of your day for you. And while the tech is still in its infancy—ChatGPT debuted to the public less than three years ago, and these are all first-gen AI pendants—they’re quite good. I thoroughly enjoyed testing them, and will continue to use them (especially Plaud and Omi) long after this article has been published.
If you’re looking to dabble in AI recording and mostly want to use a wearable to keep tabs on your personal life, you can’t go wrong with Bee. But if you want to be better organized at work, I suggest that you try one of the other three. I’m most excited about Plaud, but it has the disadvantage of requiring you to start and stop recording for each meeting; Omi and Limitless work in the background all day long.
None of them work perfectly, and the most common problem I encountered was they all either confused who was speaking or didn’t even try to tell everyone apart. Many of my summaries confused me with my co-workers, or simply said “someone suggested” a particular idea. Is that a problem? Six months from now, I’ll have forgotten the context of the conversation and this kind of ambiguity could at times be confusing. But a few days after the conversation, this is a minor inconvenience, and the summaries are super helpful.
It’s not unreasonable to have concerns about data privacy, security, and the pervasiveness of everyone being recorded all the time, often without their knowledge. This gives me a little pause as well. Even so, AI recording feels like the future to me, and I would not be surprised if lifelogging—i.e., all-day AI recording—were common, routine and mundane as soon as five years from now. In fact, these devices might be the iPods of the 2020s; eventually, AI recording with be built into our smartwatches, smartphones and smart glasses, making standalone AI pendants as quaintly obsolete in 2030 as the iPod Nano is today.
Why Trust Forbes Vetted
The Forbes Vetted team has published hundreds of tech and electronic guides that leverage our hands-on testing and research, including audio stories, like the best outdoor speakers and more.
- This story was written by executive editor Dave Johnson, a veteran tech journalist who has authored nearly three dozen books on consumer technology and digital photography.
- He’s obsessed with tools and tech related to generative AI, and is the author of our roundup of the best AI writing tools. For this story, Johnson tested all the wearable devices for at least five weeks.
- When he’s not testing AI wearables, Johnson shares the latest insights on the best pizza ovens after making over 150 pizzas. He has also ridden hundreds of miles to find the best electric bikes.
- This article was edited by consumer tech and electronics editor Rebecca Isaacs, who has been involved in tech journalism for over six years. During her time at Forbes Vetted, she’s tested many wearables, from the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses to the Apollo Wearable and more. When she’s not writing about the best smartwatches for women, she’s testing most types of audio equipment, including wireless headphones, wireless earbuds and Bluetooth speakers.
