Friend has a battery life of about 15 hours and comes in a color palette that’s nearly identical to the color palette of Apple’s original iMac computers (although Schiffmann says that’s not intentional). The design is a collaboration with Bould, the company that designed the Nest thermostat. Friend is available for preorder now at Friend.com (Schiffmann says the domain was acquired for $1.8 million), with the devices expected to start shipping in January 2025. They’ll cost $99 each and there are no paid subscriptions (at least for now).
If the notion of a wearable AI device raises your eyebrows so high you can see them from space, you’d be forgiven for being skeptical. The past few months have seen some very high-profile, spectacular failures in this emerging product category. Humane promised a wearable pin that could perform tasks that would free you from your smartphone, but it turned out to be largely useless and didn’t work properly in sunlight. The Rabbit R1 is a beautiful, colorful little device designed by godlike gadget design firm Teenage Engineering, but it’s ultimately a frustrating dud that probably should have just stuck with the app from the get-go.
“It feels like the crown jewel of AI hardware and AI companionship has fallen into the gutter,” Shiffman said. “All these companies seem to have self-destructed.”
Shiffman wants the Friend to be something very different. While the Humane Eye Ping and Rabbit R1 both aimed to automate and complete tasks and increase productivity, the Friend doesn’t try to automate or optimize. As his colleague Reese puts it, it’s more about atmosphere than it is about productivity.
“Productivity is dead. Nobody cares,” Shiffman said. “No one can beat Apple or OpenAI or whoever’s building Jarvis. The most important thing in life is really people.”
Friends provide pure companionship. They develop personalities that complement the user, pumping gas, chatting about movies after the fact, helping analyze why a date didn’t work out. Shiffman doesn’t just want his Friends to be his friends, he wants them to be his best friends – friends who are with him wherever he goes, who listen to him in whatever he does, and who offer encouragement and support. Shiffman gives the example of how he was recently playing a board game with a friend he hadn’t seen in a while, when his AI Friend told him a joke that made him happy.
“They feel more intimate with this pendant around their neck than they do with the friend they’re sitting in front of,” Shiffman says.
A friendly meeting
Although he is only 21 years old, Shiffman has already achieved a number of accomplishments in the world of technology. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shiffman, then 17 years old, made headlines one after another for launching and maintaining the first website to track COVID-19 cases around the world. He was soon named Webby Person of the Year by Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. WIRED featured Shiffman as a guest at the WIRED 25 conference in 2020. Just before dropping out of Harvard in 2022, he launched a website to help refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine find people in neighboring countries who can provide them with shelter. These altruistic acts have now led Shiffman to branch out into the AI field.
He tried to build an AI for productivity but found it lacking. The first iteration, which evolved into the Friend, was the Tab, a productivity-focused device that Shiffman hoped to use to monitor work and personal tasks. But he found himself frustrated with building a device that tried to do everything at once. This came to a head in January this year, while traveling in Japan, when he was alone in a high-rise Tokyo hotel, talking to an AI prototype that was supposed to do a lot for him. He was feeling lonely and wanted someone to talk to. Why couldn’t an AI assistant do that?
