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Thomas, 43, wears a pair of Meta 's camera-equipped glasses, a Fieldy note-taking pendant around his neck and a wristband from Amazon 's Bee, all of which record his daily life. A Pittsburgh-based business owner and a livestreamer, Thomas relies on the devices to help him stay organized, pay bills on time and set reminders.
"I'm forgetful AF," Thomas said in an interview. "My life is so crazy that not having to remember to remember is fantastic."
Not everyone is on board with his lifestyle. Earlier this week, a bystander at a local bar noticed his Meta Glasses.
"He was like, 'I don't feel comfortable,'" Thomas said. "I don't turn it off, I take it off completely because people don't really believe it's off."
It's the type of interaction users are increasingly navigating as more tech companies introduce AI-powered, always-listening devices and features, which have been marketed as useful tools to transcribe meetings, keep track of conversations, set reminders and offer personalized recommendations.
The latest example of these gadgets arrived Thursday with Amazon's Bee Frontier wearable and Bee Eclipse, a card-shaped device that attaches to a smartphone. Both devices are designed to record, transcribe and analyze a user's day.
Apple's latest Apple Watch Series 12, unveiled in September, will have Siri Recap, which "ambiently" takes notes throughout the day and generates summaries of conversations. Another feature called Live Rewind can recap 15 seconds of a conversation via a text transcription.
Meta's popular smart glasses can take photos, capture video and record voice notes or reminders. Startups including Plaud and Pocket also developed card-sized note-taking devices, while Friend offers an AI necklace.
The devices have fueled concerns that they could erode privacy, by enabling covert recording without obtaining bystanders' consent and collecting sensitive data that's potentially accessible to others.
Amazon, Google and other makers of voice-activated smart speakers faced similar privacy concerns when their devices first hit the market, in some cases leading to lawsuits and regulatory fines.
But this new generation of AI devices is also testing the limits of privacy law.
Unlike earlier smart speakers that were activated via a so-called "wake word" and sometimes stored recordings or sent audio to the cloud, some of these products can continuously listen, interpret speech, and extract its meaning without retaining the underlying audio. This capability has raised a largely untested question about whether that processing itself can amount to an unlawful interception.
"With new technology like this, my statement is always to embrace with caution," Karen Panetta, dean of graduate education at Tufts' School of Engineering and a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, said.
She added, "If I'm giving permission for myself to be recorded, or for everything I look at to be recorded, that doesn't mean everybody else around you has given that consent."
Apple and Amazon appear to have sidestepped some of the privacy concerns that dogged earlier voice assistants.
Apple says the feature does…