Friend wants to be your always-there AI buddy

The Future. As young people wrestle with a loneliness epidemic, tech entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann believes that carrying an AI around with us could provide some much-needed companionship — specifically, a device called “Friend.” If enough people give the device a try, it could spark an industry of AI-companion devices that market themselves by what kind of friend you’re looking for.

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Friend (formerly called Tab) is a glowing, circular device that you can wear around your neck or on your person, containing a microphone that can record ambiently or just when you talk to it.

• Powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, the device is meant to simply be a friend that provides encouragement, validation, and support.
• It responds to users via messages to the Friend app instead of through voice — which Schiffmann believes is more “natural and familiar.”
• None of your conversations are stored in the cloud, so if you lose the device, you lose the data — almost like an AI Tamagotchi, says The Verge.
• The device, which is still in the prototype phase, will cost $99 and won’t have a monthly subscription fee (your move, AI Pin). 30,000 are expected to ship in January.

Schiffmann points to the clear success of platforms like Character.AI and Replika as examples of the “digital relationships economy”… even if they’re sometimes taken to extremes. Friend provides a similar service but puts the technology on the go.

And with researchers noting that most people only have an average of three to five friends, Schiffmann believes that, one day, AI could be one of them.