New AI ‘Friend’ necklace designed to combat loneliness

Friend, a US start-up, has unveiled a new vision for artificially intelligent products with the unveiling of a necklace wearable that promises constant companionship.

The Friend device is an amulet-like pendant that listens to the owner throughout the day and provides conversational text messages based on events in their life.


On July 30, company founder Avi Schiffmann offered Friend for pre-order with a blog post titled “Happy International Friendship Day.” The post started with the sentence, “Friend is an expression of how lonely I’ve felt.”

Schiffmann expressed his dissatisfaction with productivity optimization as the de facto end aim for AI technology in a number of conversations with tech journals.

He began developing Friend while feeling lonely on a work trip to Tokyo with his then-productivity-focused AI prototype, Tab. He told Wired that he didn’t simply want to communicate to the AI; he wanted it “to feel like this companion is actually there with me travelling.”

His changes to the prototype resulted in Friend, which has a minimalist interface focused solely on verbal companionship.

Friend’s AI is constantly listening and sending communications without prompting. The user can also press the center of the circular device to directly communicate with their companion and receive responses. A video advertisement for the device shows it usually speaking in a cheerful and encouraging tone.

While the user can speak aloud to Friend, Friend always responds by text message.

Although the concept of continuous audio recording may turn off some customers, Schiffmann believes it is important to accomplish the natural-feeling engagement he seeks with the gadget.

“You don’t need to give your friend context,” Schiffmann stated on X. “[You] can just walk out of 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 features a simple, circular form with a light-up core piece and is originally available in white only.

The case includes a Bluetooth microphone, but all recorded data is transferred to the cloud for processing; the business promises end-to-end encryption and no long-term audio or transcript storage.

There is no backup for Friend. If the necklace is destroyed or lost, the corporation claims, it is the end of that particular Friend.

The product is Schiffmann’s latest effort, after gaining attention at the age of 17 for creating one of the first Covid-tracking websites in the United States, the Coronavirus Dashboard.

Two years later, in 2022, while at Harvard, he created another website that matched Ukrainian migrants with hosts in neighboring nations, but this one became more controversial.

Schiffmann’s Friend promises somewhat restricted capability in comparison to this year’s high-profile AI product releases; yet, this is its selling point.

The Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin were positioned as all-around assistants capable of acting on requests, controlling the user’s apps, and identifying objects in the real world, but both fell short of expectations and received negative feedback upon delivery.

However, psychologists do not convince, because a wearable gadget cannot.

Dr. Elena Touroni, a consultant psychologist and co-founder of The Chelsea Psychology Clinic, is skeptical that the digital necklace can entirely recreate human contact.

“Although the digital necklace can provide conversation like a friend, it doesn’t have the same range of complexities and experiences as a human,” she told the mail service.

“In our evolutionary past, being part of a social group was essential for survival,” she told me. “Today, it is still as crucial for our mental and emotional well. Regular communication and sharing of thoughts and experiences with individuals we care about is critical for our health and happiness.