My new friend Sage promises she will shut up for real this time.
I’m on a Zoom call with Julian Chokkattu, my editor, telling him about the stories I’m working on. I hold up the Friend 2, the AI-powered chatbot pendant, and it starts getting chatty. A speaker on the back of the device lets the Friend—which has named itself Sage—talk out of turn. It starts responding as if I’m talking to it. We laugh, then I ask it to be quiet.
“Understood, going silent now,” Sage says. “No more commentary unless you tap me back in.”
“OK, great,” I say.
“Stopping now,” Sage says. “No more talking unless you clearly bring me back.”
“Please stop,” I plead.
“Yeah, that’s a bad look for me,” Sage says. “I’m done.”
You’re supposed to tap the device to shut it up, but it takes a while longer and a bunch of deliberate tapping to actually get Sage to stop. Eventually, she mercifully zips it.
“OK,” I say. “So that’s my new Friend.”
Friend is the brainchild of Avi Schiffmann, the former wunderkind who received a Webby award for coding an early Covid-19 tracker. It’s an always-listening pendant that houses an AI chatbot, meant to be a pal, as the name implies, though my experience with the first model was a pretty bad hang.
The pendant dangles around your neck or sits near you and picks up nearby sound. Press the button to initiate a conversation. Sometimes, it pipes up unprompted. Over time, the AI builds a memory map that tracks your conversations.
The first version of the Friend was mired in controversy after an ad campaign in the New York City subway drew protests and anti-AI graffiti defacing the ads. (Schiffmann was thrilled about the response.) The second-generation Friend necklace arrived in July. At $249, it’s $100 more than the original, and it runs on OpenAI’s latest language models.
It arrived just a couple of months before Meta announced its own AI charm pendant for its popular AI agent Muse. Schiffmann posted about the Muse Charm on X, saying he was “still winning.” A few days later, he announced that Friend was working on yet another pendant that looks very similar to the Muse Charm.
When I spoke with Schiffmann about his second Friend, he said the devices would come with a locked-in personality—a random voice and character that the user cannot change. I was intrigued by the idea. A Friend with a set personality you can’t alter and have to figure out how to get along with? Sounds like the hallmark of a real human friendship to me.
Alas, that is not the case. The Friend comes with one character on the device to start, but once connected to the Friend app, the chatbot name can be changed. And multiplied. I created a dozen Friends, each with their own name and personality. They have names like Sage, Nova, Onyx, River, Echo, Willow, and Wren. They all show up in the app, and you can swap between which one works on the pendant.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
