Quick Summary
Launching in early 2025, Friend is a wearable that hopes to be your AI companion: a ChatGPT that’s always listening to you and the world around you.
Some of the best sci-fi isn’t really about the future. It’s about now, and it extrapolates today’s tech and trends to talk about how we live and where we’re heading. So it’s not really surprising to see the 2013 movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls for his digital assistant, become closer to reality every day.
The latest example of sci-fi becoming reality appears to be Friend, an “AI companion” that feels like a cross between Her and a Black Mirror episode. The AI wearable, as described by The Verge, is a $99 glowing pendant that listens as you go about your day and can then talk to you about it.
The fellowship of this ring
Let’s talk about the tech first. Friend connects to an iPhone over Bluetooth and listens constantly. If you want to chat to your Friend you press a button; it sends its response as a message on your iPhone.
It can also respond to what’s going on around you. So as a device it isn’t more than a wireless phone mic (a version with a camera is also planned) for a ChatGPT-style chatbot. But the pendant is just the vehicle.
The goal is to create an AI that you consider part of your friend group. Or if you’re feeling dystopian, that replaces it.
Creator Avi Schiffmann originally intended the wearable as a productivity tool, but reckons that that’s best left to Apple and OpenAI. Instead, Friend is supposed to be a portable pal: “a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that.”
Speaking to The Verge, Schiffmann says it’s not intended to replace real friends – but he doesn’t reject the idea that an AI might be one of the five people you spend most of your time with. As he describes it, it’s like a pen pal without the delays crossed with a Tamagotchi virtual pet. But what springs to mind most for me is Destiny’s Ghost, the robot sphere that follows you everywhere and tells you that wizards are coming from the moon.
I’m rather cynical about AI. To me, it feels like it’s another tech bubble where wild claims raise big sums of money for products that don’t quite deliver: check out the reviews of the Rabbit R1 for a demonstration of how a good AI demo doesn’t necessarily mean a good AI product. But my worry with this one isn’t that it won’t live up to its promises, but that it will.
Over on X (formerly Twitter) you can see ample evidence of people interacting with bots that they think are real people. That’s rarely a positive thing: the bots are largely sowing division, not bringing us together.
Looking at the comments on The Verge and underneath the YouTube promo clip, lots of people seem to have the same concerns over Friend that I do. Assuming that they’re actually people, of course.
