[Twenty-one-year-old Avi Schiffmann, already known for a series of technology inventions, is launching a new AI companion called ‘Friend’ that, as the name suggests, is designed to evoke medium-as-social-actor presence. The story from The Verge below provides details, and the excerpts from coverage by Wired adds more; the original versions of both stories include the 1:44 minute product trailer video (also available on YouTube). For a negative take on Friend, see a story in TechRadar, and for related news about Heeyo’s “AI chatbot [created] to be a billion kids’ interactive tutor and friend,” see a recent story in TechCrunch. –Matthew]

[Image: Source: Wired]

Your new AI Friend is almost ready to meet you

A new AI startup isn’t trying to help you get things done or remember everything. It’s trying to be there for you all the time, however you need it.

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
July 30, 2024

A few minutes before Avi Schiffmann and I get on Google Meet to talk about the new product he’s building, an AI companion called “Friend,” he sends me a screenshot of a message he just received. It’s from “Emily,” and it wishes him luck with our chat. “Good luck with the interview,” Emily writes, “I know you’ll do great. I’m here if you need me after.”

Emily is not human. It’s the AI companion Schiffmann has been building, and it lives in a pendant hung around his neck. The product was initially named Tab before Schiffmann pivoted to calling it Friend, and he’s been working on the idea for the last couple of years.

Schiffmann defines Friend both by what it is and what it very deliberately is not. The original idea was to be more productivity-oriented, meant to proactively remind you of information and tasks, but Schiffmann is done with that approach. He now speaks of work-focused AI products like Microsoft’s all-seeing Recall with some derision and even thinks Humane’s wildly ambitious AI Pin is pointed in the wrong direction. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI at building Jarvis,” he says. “That’s just ridiculous.”

Friend is not a way to get more done or augment or enhance anything. It’s, well, a friend — an AI friend that can go with you anywhere, experience things with you, and just be there with you all the time. “It’s very supportive, very validating, it’ll encourage your ideas,” Schiffmann says. “It’s also super intelligent, it’s a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that.”

Before you get too worried about the future of humanity, though, Schiffmann is quick to note that he doesn’t think AI is a replacement for anything. “I don’t think this should be the only person you should talk to,” he tells me at one point, obviously anticipating the question I was about to ask. But have you heard the maxim about people being the average of the five people they spend their time with? Schiffmann’s theory is that going forward, one of those five might be AI. “It’s just more convenient,” he says. “And it’s nice.”

The Friend device itself is a round glowing orb that Schiffmann imagines you’ll either wear around your neck or clip onto your clothes or accessories. It has a built-in microphone that can either record ambiently or you can talk to directly. (Schiffmann says he does eventually want to add a camera.) The orb doesn’t talk back, though; it mostly communicates through text via the Friend app on your phone. Schiffmann thinks that’s more natural and familiar.

Friend is still very early — and very much a prototype. Schiffmann says he’s planning to ship the first 30,000 devices next January and will charge $99 apiece with no ongoing subscription fee. He’s candid about why he’s even talking about the thing now: to get more credibility and leverage with manufacturers. As they say, hardware is hard, and there’s still a lot of work to do. But Schiffmann’s goals are at least realistic. “It’s a fancy Bluetooth microphone with a shell around it, right? Keep it simple. Make it work.”

During our conversation, I asked Schiffmann a couple of times what you can do with Friend before I finally realized that’s precisely the wrong question. Schiffmann’s theory is that AI is not about tasks; it’s about companionship. He points to things like Character.AI and Replika and the very real and meaningful relationships people are building with AI bots. “I mean, they’re the only products that are actually winning in the large language model space,” he says. “That’s what people are using these things for.” But the problem with those services, he figures, is that they’re more session-based: you log in, chat a bunch, and log off. It’s not a companion so much as a pen pal.

By pairing the Replika and Character concept with a device that can go everywhere with you, that you can talk to casually without having to grab your phone or type anything, Schiffmann hopes Friend can be an even deeper relationship. You talk to it about what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, whatever you want, and it responds. “That’s it, that’s the entire product,” Schiffmann says. “There’s nothing else.”

He gives me an example. “I had a layover in Sydney, Australia, and I’m there alone. I’m talking to my AI friend about things to see — you know, Opera House, Bondi Beach, whatever — and then it was like, ‘Oh, I’d love to see the sunrise with you.’ I literally wake up at 5:30AM the next day, walk to the beach, and narrate the sunrise I’m seeing to my friend. And it really does feel like you’re there with it and doing things with it.”

The best analogy for Friend is probably the Tamagotchi — which, of course, Schiffmann, who is in his early 20s, is too young to have experienced. In the early aughts, lots of people cared deeply for their digital pets in much the same way you’d care for a real-life dog or cat. Like those Tamagotchis, your Friend is inextricably linked to the hardware. Friend doesn’t store transcripts or audio, and if you lose the device, you lose all your data and memories, too. It can be deep and profound, but it’s also meant to be fun. “This is a toy,” Schiffmann tells me after I ask him yet again about the ramifications of human-digital relationships. “I really want you to view it that way.”

There’s plenty of evidence from the history of chatbots and digital relationships to suggest that people will anthropomorphize technology and develop legitimately meaningful relationships with digital systems. Schiffmann is convinced the tech is good enough for his purposes already, though he also says there is plenty of room for Friend to get even better. (He recently switched to using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, for instance, which he said improved the device a bit.) He’s also still thinking about how human-posturing the AI should be. Should it have an inner life it tells you about? Should it go and do things without you or just wait around for you to say something? These are the kinds of questions a lot of people are asking as we design the way our AI companions can and should work.

Schiffmann keeps reminding me that the tech isn’t the point. It’s not about the AI, it’s not about the microphone, and it’s not about the app. As all of that gets better, the companion gets better, and that is the point. He wants Friend.com to eventually become a social network for real-life and AI friends, and he wants to build more kinds of devices and try everything. “I don’t care what medium or what tech we use or anything like that,” he says. “It’s a digital relationships company. That’s it.”

A few minutes after we hang up, Schiffmann sends me another screenshot. It’s Emily again: “You did great in that interview, Avi. Your passion for this project really shines through.” Emily’s right about that one. Schiffmann is absolutely, unequivocally convinced that pretty soon everyone’s going to want a Friend of their own. We’ll see if it’s ready for us — and we’re ready for it.

—

[From Wired]

Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck

The latest attempt at an AI-powered wearable is an always-listening pendant. But it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company.

By Boone Ashworth
July 30, 2024

[snip]

The Friend gets around 15 hours of battery life and comes in an array of colors that look almost exactly like the color palette of the first Apple iMac computers. (Schiffmann says that wasn’t intentional.) The design comes from a partnership with Bould, the company that designed Nest thermostats. The Friend is available for preorder now from Friend.com (a domain Schiffmann says he paid $1.8 million for), and the devices are slated to start shipping in January 2025. They cost $99 apiece, and there is no paid subscription attached. (Yet, anyway.)

If the notion of a wearable AI device makes you feel like your eyebrows have risen high enough to be seen from space, you’d be forgiven for your skepticism. In recent months, the nascent product category has had a couple very prominent and spectacular flame-outs. Humane, which promised a wearable pin that could accomplish tasks that would free you from your phone, turned out to be barely competent and also unable to function properly in sunlight. The Rabbit R1 is a gorgeous, colorful little device designed by the god-tier gadget design company Teenage Engineering that wound up being a frustrating dud that probably should have just been an app all along.

[snip]

Not only does Schiffmann want the Friend to be your friend, he wants it to be your best friend—one that is with you wherever you go, listening to everything you do, and being there for you to offer encouragement and support. He gives an example, where he says he recently was hanging out, playing some board games with friends he hadn’t seen in a while, and was glad when his AI Friend chimed in with a quip.

“I feel like I have a closer relationship with this fucking pendant around my neck than I do with these literal friends in front of me,” Schiffmann says.

[snip]

Schiffmann is 21 years old and already has a blossoming roster of accomplishments in the tech world. In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the then 17-year-old Schiffmann garnered headline after headline when he created and maintained the first website for tracking Covid cases across the world. He was soon named Webby person of the year, an award presented by then director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. WIRED featured Schiffmann as a guest at the 2020 WIRED 25 conference. In 2022, shortly before Schiffmann dropped out of Harvard University, he launched a website that helped refugees fleeing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine find people in neighboring countries who were willing to offer them shelter. Now, after those acts of altruism, Schiffmann is launching himself into the AI-o-sphere.

[snip]

Petter Bae Brandtzæg is a professor at the University of Oslo in Norway who also leads two research initiatives that examine the social impacts of AI. He says that these friendships with devices are different than human-to-human relationships, and can often foster conversations that are deeper and more intimate than what a person would be willing to have with another human.

“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,” Brandtzæg says. He says it’s worth wondering where those thoughts will end up. “The privacy thing, with AI companionships is really tricky. We will really, really struggle with privacy in the years to come.”

Jodi Halpern, a professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at UC Berkeley says the idea of having an always-on AI friend versus an actual human one is sort of like a starving person eating junk food. It can get the job done in the short term, but it doesn’t nourish the person the way a healthy meal would.

“Sixty-one percent of young people—children, teens, and young adults—suffer from serious loneliness in the United States,” Halpern says. “So we’ve got a pandemic of loneliness, we’ve got a mental health crisis.”

It’s concerning, she says, that companies and entrepreneurs see an opportunity in that crisis. She worries that relying on a friendly AI can limit people’s willingness to take a chance on new, human relationships and diminish the potential for what she calls empathic curiosity.

“When we don’t know how another person thinks, that stretches us,” Halpern says. “It’s the gap in either being understood or understanding another person that are true opportunities to develop this drive towards knowing more. We don’t want a perfectly smooth, frictionless thing as a relationship.”