AI-Powered Necklace Will Be Your Friend for $99 [CNET]

July 30, 2024July 30, 2024 Gael Cooper technology

Friend is a pendant that will talk to you via text, not voice, when you’re lonely or just any time you want conversation.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, and generational studies Credentials

Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won “Headline Writer of the Year” award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.

Do you ever find yourself speaking to Alexa or Siri just to have someone to talk to? Then you might be the right audience for an upcoming AI-powered necklace called friend (lowercase “F” is their style), an always-listening pendant. The $99 necklace can’t turn your lights on and off or Google things for you like Alexa can. Its aim is to keep you company if you’re lonely.

Friend also doesn’t speak back to you via an AI voice, like Amazon’s Alexa. Instead, you tap your pendant to start the conversation, and it responds via text.

If that sounds like a Black Mirror episode, you’re not the first to make that comparison.

“What in the Black Mirror episode is this…” wrote one commenter on the YouTube trailer for the product.

The trailer shows the friend device responding to a woman hiking who jokes that she doesn’t know how to yell “woo,” dissing a video-game player, praising the show someone is watching on her phone and asking her about her falafel (she says it’s “dank” and then spills sauce on the device). In the final and most awkward scenario, a woman who’s apparently on a date tells her partner she’s never brought anyone to this rooftop before, except for her AI friend, who, the date already knows, “goes everywhere” with her.

The trailer points out what would seem to be a major problem with friend: each time a person tries to converse with the device, they have to tap it, wait for a corresponding beep and then turn their attention to their phone to read the text, since friend can’t just speak back like the virtual assistants to which it seems similar. If you’re lonely, but you already have access to a smartphone, wouldn’t you just text a real person or lose yourself in doomscrolling the news or read Reddit or play Candy Crush to ease your loneliness?

Friend may also initiate conversations, apparently. The FAQ notes that, when connected via Bluetooth, friend is “always listening and forming their own internal thoughts,” and adds, “We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”

A representative for friend didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The friend pendant is about the size of an Apple AirTag, Wired reports. Creator Avi Schiffmann, who’s just 21, made headlines for creating the first website to track COVID-19 cases around the world. He told Wired the device came out of his own loneliness, and how he just wanted an AI assistant to talk to him.

A woman is shown on her bed wearing the friend pendant and holding her smartphone. — You’ll need to keep your smartphone handy to read responses from the friend pendant.

Friend

Friend joins a host of similar, uh, friends

Friend joins a growing universe of wearable or handheld devices that are using AI to communicate with you for various reasons. The Rabbit R1 device is an AI assistant that can answer questions or call you a taxi. The Humane AI pin is a voice-controlled communicator that can do language translation, take photos and react to them and even pop up a laser display on the palm of your hand. And, of course, AI chatbots like ChatGPT also produce text responses as friend does but generally respond to typed questions instead of spoken ones. It remains to be seen which devices will find a loyal audience and fill a real role.

According to TechCrunch, Schiffmann has raised $2.5 million in funding at a $50 million valuation from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. The site reports that friend evolved out of Schiffman’s original idea for a $600 pendant called Tab, that was meant to help keep track of people and transcribe meetings.

You need a phone to use the device, as friend functions over Bluetooth and requires an internet connection. Right now, it works only on iOS phones, though the product FAQ says Android will be added.

The “always on” element of the device is sure to concern some. The FAQ tries to relieve those concerns and says that “no audio or transcripts are stored past your friend’s context window. Your data is end-to-end encrypted. All memories can be deleted in one click within the friend app.”

Friend can be preordered for $99, and the site says it will begin shipping the pendant in 2025. There’s no subscription fee, and it’s available only in the US and Canada.

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