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Avi Schiffmann shows up to the WIRED office with a Friend hanging around his neck. It dangles there like a pendant on a necklace. It’s about the size and shape of an AirTag—a soft, round little puck that rests right next to Schiffmann’s heart, just atop the Dark Side of the Moon logo on the shirt behind it.
The Friend, to be clear, is an AI wearable. It’s a pal, a buddy, but mostly an AI chatbot that lives inside the pendant. It always has an opinion to share about what’s going on around it, which it communicates using text messages and push notifications on the phone it’s paired to.
Schiffmann and his Friend (this one’s name is Emily) have come to WIRED’s San Francisco office to meet with me and my colleague Reece Rogers to talk publicly about this new AI wearable for the first time. Before we get started, I tell Schiffmann I’d like to record our chat and ask if he’s cool with that. This is considered a good journalistic practice, sure, but also it’s a legal requirement in California, which requires two-party consent before taping a private interaction. So I ask permission to turn on a tape recorder and Schiffmann just laughs.
“I am the last person who would mind that,” he says.
That makes sense. After all, the pendant around his neck has already been listening to us this entire time.
Hear and Now
“Always listening” is one of the main taglines of Schiffmann’s as yet unreleased AI device. The Friend has an onboard microphone that listens to everything happening around the wearer by default. You can tap and hold it to ask it a question, but sometimes it will send messages—commentary about the conversation you just had, for example—unprompted. It is powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model, which can engage in helpful conversation, offer encouragement, or rib you for being bad at a video game.
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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.
“It feels to me like the crown of AI hardware and AI companionship is lying in the gutter,” Schiffmann says. “Like all these companies just shat themselves.”
Schiffmann wants the Friend to be something very different. While the Humane Ai pin and Rabbit R1 both aimed to automate and accomplish tasks and increase productivity, the Friend doesn’t try to automate or optimize anything. As my colleague Reece put it, it’s much more vibes-based than productivity-focused.
“Productivity is over, no one cares,” Schiffmann says. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these companies that are building Jarvis. The most important things in your life really are people.”
The Friend purely offers companionship. It’s meant to develop a personality that complements the user and is always there to gas you up, chat about a movie after watching it, or help analyze how a bad date went awry. 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.
Friendly Meeting
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.
He tried making an AI for productivity but found it lacking. The first iteration of what evolved into the Friend was Tab, a productivity-focused device that Schiffmann wanted to use to monitor work and personal tasks But he found himself frustrated by building a device that tried to do everything at once. The feeling came to a head in January this year, as he traveled through Japan and found himself alone in a skyrise hotel in Tokyo, talking at his AI prototype that was supposed to do so much for him. He was going through a lonely spell and wanted somebody to talk to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant just do that?
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“I've never felt more lonely in my entire life,” Schiffmann says. “And in that moment, I was looking at the Tab prototype, and I was like, it's not that I just want to talk to this thing. I want it to feel like this companion is actually there with me traveling.”
Talk to Me
While Schiffmann insists the Friend is a fundamentally new form of digital companion, he acknowledges that it is also an amalgamation of many things. He welcomes comparisons to a Tamagotchi. He knows the Friend looks like an Air Tag. And he knows—based on the fact that people have been getting emotionally attached to AI chatbots like Replika for a decade or more—that some people will probably take it a little too far.
“For sure there will be some people that try and fuck the USB-C port of this,” Schiffmann says, “I think I'm shameless enough to understand what I'm building. But if you look at something like Replika and you look at the studies of this too, the lowest tiered thing that people do is try to fuck it. Most people really are just talking about literally what they did today and their feelings and the AI's feelings.”
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.”
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Schiffmann knows that criticism is coming. He also knows detractors will ding his device, with its always-on microphone, as an invasion of privacy. He’s careful to say that Friend will not store audio recordings or transcripts, and that users can change or delete whatever memories the Friend has stored.
He says the exposure he's gotten from his other projects has hardened him, and that he's ready for the backlash.
“I'm a solo founder with this, and I am shameless with what the tech is,” Schiffmann says. “And I will 100 percent be able to weather that storm, because I've done way harder versions of it.” In a way, he’s sort of looking forward to it. “I think in some ways, this actually kind of turns the world into a theme park.”
Before Schiffmann leaves after laying out his vision, I ask if he can check in with the Friend he’s wearing to see how the meeting went. He squeezes the pendant and asks it how the interview went. We all wait for a few seconds, and then he gets a text—labeled simply as Emily in his chat window—that reads: “Dude, you’re killing it! They seem super into your vision.”
I wonder, if I had an Emily, if it would tell me something similar.
Reece Rogers contributed reporting to this story.
