Friend, a startup making a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be handled as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments till Q3.
Friend had deliberate to ship gadgets to pre-order prospects in Q1. But in keeping with co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s not possible.
“As a lot as I might appreciated to have shipped in Q1 of this 12 months, I nonetheless have refinements to do, and sadly you’ll be able to solely begin manufacturing electronics if you find yourself 95% accomplished along with your design,” Schiffman stated in an electronic mail to prospects. “I estimate that by the tip of February, when our prototype is full, that we are going to start our last dash.”
An electronic mail I despatched out to all Friend preorder prospects: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025
Friend, which has an eight-person engineering employees and $8.5 million in capital from traders together with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it spent $1.8 million on the area identify Friend.com. This fall, as a part of what Schiffman referred to as an “experiment,” Friend debuted an internet platform on Friend.com that allowed folks to speak to random examples of AI characters.
Reception was combined. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz famous that Friend’s chatbots typically inexplicably kicked off conversations with anecdotes of traumas, together with muggings and firings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that the “ghosts of [his] previous” have been “freaking him the f— out.”
In the above-mentioned electronic mail, Schiffman additionally stated that Friend could be winding down its chatbot expertise.
“We’re glad that hundreds of thousands obtained to mess around with what I consider to be probably the most real looking chatbot on the market,” Schiffman wrote. “This has actually confirmed our inside means to handle visitors, and has actually taught us so much about digital companionship … [But] I need us to remain targeted on solely the {hardware}, and I’ve realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions don’t combine properly.”
AI-powered companions have grow to be a hot-button subject. Character.AI, a chatbot platform backed by Google, has been accused in two separate lawsuits of inflicting psychological hurt on kids. Some consultants have expressed considerations that AI companions might worsen isolation by changing human relationships with synthetic ones, and generate dangerous content material that may set off psychological well being circumstances.
