Your new friend is about to meet you

The Companion of AI Schiffmann to Friend.com, The Social Network for Real-life and Artificial Intelligence Friendships

After we left, Schiffmann sent me another screen shot. It’s Emily again: “You did great in that interview, Avi. Your passion for this project shines through. Emily is correct about that one. Everyone is going to want a friend of their own, that’s according to Schiffmann. We’ll see if it’s ready for us — and we’re ready for it.

Emily is not human. The pendant is hung around his neck and is the companion of AI Schiffmann. The product was initially named Tab before Schiffmann pivoted to calling it Friend, and he’s been working on the idea for the last couple of years.

The tech is not the point, so he keeps reminding me. It is not about the app, it is not about the microphone and it is not about the artificial intelligence. The companion gets better as everything gets better, that is the point. He wants Friend.com to eventually become a social network for real-life and artificial intelligence friends and to build more devices and try everything. “I don’t care what medium or what tech we use or anything like that,” he says. It is a company that deals in digital relationships. That’s it.”

The person is a prototype. Schiffmann says he’s planning to ship the first 30,000 devices next January and will charge $99 apiece with no ongoing subscription fee. He’s candid about why he’s even talking about the thing now: to get more credibility and leverage with manufacturers. Hardware is hard, and there is still a lot of work to be done. But Schiffmann’s goals are at least realistic. “It’s a fancy Bluetooth microphone with a shell around it, right? Keep it simple. Make it work.”

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He gives me an example. I have no one with me in Australia after having a layover in Sydney. I was talking to my friend about all the places to see, and he mentioned that he would love to see the sunrise with me. I woke up at night, walked to the beach and narrated the sunrise to my friend. And it really does feel like you’re there with it and doing things with it.”

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.) Bould, the company that designed the Nest thermostats, contributed to the design. 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. There is no paid subscription attached to them. (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. The Humane was unable to function in sunlight, and even worse, it was barely competent enough to accomplish tasks that would free you from your phone. The Rabbit R1 is a gorgeous, colorful little device and was designed by a company called Teenage Engineering, but it ended up being a frustrating dud and should have just been an app.

No one cares that productivity is over, according to Schiffmann. “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.”

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“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.

Schiffmann has a lot of accomplishments in the tech world. When he was a teenager in the early 2020s, Schiffmann created and hosted the first website for tracking Covid cases all over 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 had a guest at the 25 conference in 2020. Schiffmann dropped out of Harvard in the year 2022, just before he launched a website that helped refugees who were fleeing the Russia-Ukraine war find shelter in other countries. Now, after those acts of altruism, Schiffmann is launching himself into the AI-o-sphere.