Friend delays shipment of AI companion pendant
Friend, a startup developing a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to serve as a digital companion, has delayed its first shipments until the third quarter.
Friend plans to ship to pre-order customers in the first quarter. But co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman says that's no longer feasible.
“While I hope to ship in the first quarter of this year, I still need to make improvements and unfortunately can only start manufacturing the electronics when the design is 95% complete,” Schiffman said in an email to customers. “I estimate that by the end of February, when our prototype is complete, we will begin the final sprint.”
Email I send to all my friends pre-order customers: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025
Friend, which has eight engineering staff and $8.5 million in funding from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it spent $1.8 million to buy the Friend.com domain name. This fall, as part of what Schiffman calls an “experiment,” Friend launched a web platform on Friend.com that allows people to converse with random examples of artificial intelligence characters.
Reception was mixed. TechRadar's Eric Schwartz noted that Friend's chatbot often inexplicably started conversations with anecdotes about trauma, including robberies and firings. In fact, when a reporter visited Friend.com on Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that “ghosts of[his]past” were “terrifying the hell out of him.”
In the above email, Schiffman also said that Friend would be phasing out its chatbot experience.
“We're excited for millions of people to be able to use what I believe to be the most realistic chatbot possible,” Schiffman wrote. “It really demonstrated our internal ability to manage traffic and it really taught us a lot about digital companions…(but) I wish we had just focused on the hardware, and I realize that digital chatbots and physical companions don't mix well. ”
AI-powered companions have become a hot topic. Character.AI, a chatbot platform backed by Google, has been accused of causing psychological harm to children in two separate lawsuits. Some experts worry that AI companions could replace human relationships with artificial ones, exacerbating feelings of isolation and generating harmful content that could trigger mental health conditions.