Friend’s $99 necklace uses AI to help combat loneliness

AI hardware is all the rage in startup land — though receptions have thus far been mixed. Two notable examples, Rabbit and Humane, released devices to disappointing results. a16z-backed Limitless and Exor-backed Bee AI, meanwhile, are working on their own screenless AI wearables.

Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout who built a Webby Award-winning website tracking COVID-19, is working on an AI device called Friend. As the name suggests, the neck-worn device is designed to be treated as a companion.

Schiffmann has raised $2.5 million in funding at a $50 million valuation from investors like Caffeinated Capital’s Raymond Tonsing, ZFellows founder Cory Levy, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Solana founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, Morning Brew CEO and co-founder Austin Rief, Jordan Singer, who works on AI efforts at Figma, and Google senior product manager Logan Kilpatrick.

The company said today it will start taking pre-orders of its basic white version, which is priced at $99 and expected to ship in January 2025.

Product

Rather than focusing on productivity, the device is just a thin layer that connects to your phone via Bluetooth and constantly listens to you, in a bid to combat loneliness.

You can tap on the walkie-talkie button on the hardware and talk to the device. It will send you an in-app response to it like a text, and since Friend is listening to you all the time, it also can proactively send a message. For instance, it might wish you good luck before an interview.

And that’s about it.

Schiffmann believes that having a hardware around your neck makes it easier to talk to an AI companion rather than just having an app.

“I would really view the product as a like an emotional toy. I think the only use successful use case of large language models is people talking about their day and their feelings to tools like Replika or Character AI. But with hardware present, I believe it is a better emotional connect,” Schiffmann told TechCrunch.

AI companion and nothing else

Schiffmann said the device isn’t designed to be a therapist or help you at work. It’s an AI friend you can talk to and nothing more. He adds that constant companionship is one of AI’s killer use cases.

Addressing loneliness wasn’t always the goal. Last year, Schiffmann set out to create a $600 pendant called Tag to help keep track of people and transcribe meetings. He took around $100,000 in pre-orders.

Earlier this year, however, he pivoted. The startup is giving Tag pre-orders the option to pre-order friend — or simply get a refund.

Schiffmann says that he is leaning into this position and adopting an “always listening” tagline. He clarifies, however, that the company is not storing any of the recordings and you can choose to delete texts at anytime as well.