An artificial intelligence (AI) developer wants to make his next creation your next bestie.
Some young people have imaginary friends. Television shows and movies like “Barney & Friends” and “Toy Story” brought the concept of imaginary friends to screens and may have even created nostalgia for that feeling.
Avi Schiffmann is turning that feeling into reality with a device he calls “friend” that he promoted on X (formerly Twitter).
The video in the post, which has garnered 22.5 million views at the time of writing, shows users with a wearable pendant engaging in a detailed conversation via a chat prompt on their mobile phones. The users press the button on the pendant, which responds to what the person says and is constantly listening to find prompted and unprompted ways to communicate with the user.
Although AI fuels the pendant, the company’s website says friend is not imaginary. The product was birthed out of the 21-year-old founder’s personal need for connection.
“friend is an expression of how lonely I’ve felt,” Schiffmann wrote in a blog post.
According to Wired, friend uses Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model and has about 15 hours of battery life. Priced at $99 per pendant, the device comes with two gray lanyards, a case, and a USB-C charging cable. It was designed in partnership with Bould, the same company that designed Nest thermostat systems.
Although other devices seek to help individuals with productivity and work processes, friend is designed to go beyond that. Schiffmann wants his device to be a companion, not just a tool.
“Productivity is over; no one cares,” Schiffmann told Wired. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these companies that are building Jarvis. The most important things in your life really are people.”
Like many AI tools, a device that’s always listening will likely incur privacy concerns from users. However, the friend website says it does not store audio or transcripts past its “context window” and that users can delete the end-to-end encrypted data with one click in the friend app.
“The thing with AI companions is that we’re a lot more intimate in our interactions with AI companions, and we will share our inner thoughts,” said Petter Bae Brandtzæg, a professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, per Wired. “The privacy thing, with AI companionships, is really tricky. We will really, really struggle with privacy in the years to come.”
The wearable friend is set to release in early 2025 in the United States and Canada.
