Friend, a startup creating a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3.
Friend had planned to ship devices to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s no longer feasible.
“As much as I would liked to have shipped in Q1 of this year, I still have refinements to do, and unfortunately you can only start manufacturing electronics when you are 95% done with your design,” Schiffman said in an email to customers. “I estimate that by the end of February, when our prototype is complete, that we will begin our final sprint.”
An email I sent out to all Friend preorder customers: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025
Friend, which has an eight-person engineering staff and $8.5 million in capital from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it spent $1.8 million on the domain name Friend.com. This fall, as part of what Schiffman called an “experiment,” Friend debuted a web platform on Friend.com that allowed people to talk to random examples of AI characters.
Reception was mixed. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz noted that Friend’s chatbots often inexplicably kicked off conversations with anecdotes of traumas, including muggings and firings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that the “ghosts of [his] past” were “freaking him the f— out.”
In the above-mentioned email, Schiffman also said that Friend would be winding down its chatbot experience.
“We’re glad that millions got to play around with what I believe to be the most realistic chatbot out there,” Schiffman wrote. “This has really proven our internal ability to manage traffic, and has really taught us a lot about digital companionship … [But] I want us to stay focused on solely the hardware, and I have realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions don’t mix well.”
AI-powered companions have become a hot-button topic. Character.AI, a chatbot platform backed by Google, has been accused in two separate lawsuits of inflicting psychological harm on children. Some experts have expressed concerns that AI companions could worsen isolation by replacing human relationships with artificial ones, and generate harmful content that can trigger mental health conditions.