A new vision for artificially intelligent devices has emerged from US start-up Friend, which is launching a necklace wearable that promises constant companionship.
The Friend device is an amulet-like pendant that listens to its wearer throughout their day and sends conversational text messages based on things that are happening in their life.
Friend launched for pre-order on 30 July with a blog post by company founder Avi Schiffmann titled “Happy International Friendship Day”, beginning with the line “Friend is an expression of how lonely I’ve felt”.
In several interviews with tech publications, Schiffmann discussed how he had become disillusioned with productivity optimisation as a de facto end goal for AI technology.
He started to develop Friend while feeling lonely on a business trip in Tokyo with his then productivity-focused AI prototype, Tab. He found he didn’t just want to talk to the AI, he told Wired, he wanted it “to feel like this companion is actually there with me travelling”.
His tweaks to that prototype became Friend, which has a stripped-down functionality focused purely on conversational companionship.
Friend’s AI is always listening and sends messages without prompting. But the user can also press on the centre of the circular device to talk to their companion directly and receive a response in reply. A video ad for the device shows it usually taking a positive and supportive tone.
While the user can speak out loud to Friend, Friend always replies via text message.
Although the idea of constant audio recording will be a dealbreaker for some consumers, Schiffmann considers it necessary to get the natural-feeling interaction he is aiming for with the device.
“You don’t need to give your Friend context,” Schiffman said on X. “[You] can just walk out a meeting and say ‘that was crazy’ and they understand.”
“Just makes for a really seamless integration of a digital friend into your life.”
Physically, Friend has a simple, rounded design with a light-up central element, and is initially being sold in a white colour only.
The casing contains a Bluetooth microphone but all recorded data is sent to the cloud for processing, with the company promising end-to-end encryption and no long-term audio or transcript storage.
There is also no back-up for Friend. If the necklace is damaged or lost, the company says, that is the end of that particular Friend.
The product is the latest in a run of ventures from Schiffman, who first gained recognition while still in high school at age 17 when he created one of the first Covid-tracking websites in the US, the Coronavirus Dashboard.
Two years later while at Harvard in 2022, he built another website to match Ukrainian refugees to hosts in neighbouring countries, although that proved more controversial.
With Friend, he is promising relatively limited functionality compared to this year’s high-profile AI product launches; however, that is the selling point.
The Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin were positioned as all-round assistants that could action requests, control the user’s apps or identify objects in the real world, but both failed to live up to expectations and met with poor reviews upon release.