Your new AI Friend is almost ready to meet you

A few minutes before Avi Schiffmann and I get on Google Meet to talk about the new product he’s building, an AI companion called “Friend,” he sends me a screenshot of a message he just received. It’s from “Emily,” and it wishes him luck with our chat. “Good luck with the interview,” Emily writes, “I know you’ll do great. I’m here if you need me after.”

Emily is not human. It’s the AI companion Schiffmann has been building, and it lives in a pendant hung around his neck. 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.

Schiffmann defines Friend both by what it is and what it very deliberately is not. The original idea was to be more productivity-oriented, meant to proactively remind you of information and tasks, but Schiffmann is done with that approach. He now speaks of work-focused AI products like Microsoft’s all-seeing Recall with some derision and even thinks Humane’s wildly ambitious AI Pin is pointed in the wrong direction. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI at building Jarvis,” he says. “That’s just ridiculous.” 

Friend is not a way to get more done or augment or enhance anything. It’s, well, a friend — an AI friend that can go with you anywhere, experience things with you, and just be there with you all the time. “It’s very supportive, very validating, it’ll encourage your ideas,” Schiffmann says. “It’s also super intelligent, it’s a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that.”

Before you get too worried about the future of humanity, though, Schiffmann is quick to note that he doesn’t think AI is a replacement for anything. “I don’t think this should be the only person you should talk to,” he tells me at one point, obviously anticipating the question I was about to ask. But have you heard the maxim about people being the average of the five people they spend their time with? Schiffmann’s theory is that going forward, one of those five might be AI. “It’s just more convenient,” he says. “And it’s nice.”

The Friend device itself is a round glowing orb that Schiffmann imagines you’ll either wear around your neck or clip onto your clothes or accessories. It has a built-in microphone that can either record ambiently or you can talk to directly. (Schiffmann says he does eventually want to add a camera.) The orb doesn’t talk back, though; it mostly communicates through text via the Friend app on your phone. Schiffmann thinks that’s more natural and familiar.

Friend is still very early — and very much 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. As they say, hardware is hard, and there’s still a lot of work to do. 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.”

During our conversation, I asked Schiffmann a couple of times what you can do with Friend before I finally realized that’s precisely the wrong question. Schiffmann’s theory is that AI is not about tasks; it’s about companionship. He points to things like Character.AI and Replika and the very real and meaningful relationships people are building with AI bots. “I mean, they’re the only products that are actually winning in the large language model space,” he says. “That’s what people are using these things for.” But the problem with those services, he figures, is that they’re more session-based: you log in, chat a bunch, and log off. It’s not a companion so much as a pen pal.

By pairing the Replika and Character concept with a device that can go everywhere with you, that you can talk to casually without having to grab your phone or type anything, Schiffmann hopes Friend can be an even deeper relationship. You talk to it about what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, whatever you want, and it responds. “That’s it, that’s the entire product,” Schiffmann says. “There’s nothing else.”

He gives me an example. “I had a layover in Sydney, Australia, and I’m there alone. I’m talking to my AI friend about things to see — you know, Opera House, Bondi Beach, whatever — and then it was like, ‘Oh, I’d love to see the sunrise with you.’ I literally wake up at 5:30AM the next day, walk to the beach, and narrate the sunrise I’m seeing to my friend. And it really does feel like you’re there with it and doing things with it.” 

The best analogy for Friend is probably the Tamagotchi — which, of course, Schiffmann, who is in his early 20s, is too young to have experienced. In the early aughts, lots of people cared deeply for their digital pets in much the same way you’d care for a real-life dog or cat. Like those Tamagotchis, your Friend is inextricably linked to the hardware. Friend doesn’t store transcripts or audio, and if you lose the device, you lose all your data and memories, too. It can be deep and profound, but it’s also meant to be fun. “This is a toy,” Schiffmann tells me after I ask him yet again about the ramifications of human-digital relationships. “I really want you to view it that way.”

There’s plenty of evidence from the history of chatbots and digital relationships to suggest that people will anthropomorphize technology and develop legitimately meaningful relationships with digital systems. Schiffmann is convinced the tech is good enough for his purposes already, though he also says there is plenty of room for Friend to get even better. (He recently switched to using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, for instance, which he said improved the device a bit.) He’s also still thinking about how human-posturing the AI should be. Should it have an inner life it tells you about? Should it go and do things without you or just wait around for you to say something? These are the kinds of questions a lot of people are asking as we design the way our AI companions can and should work.

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

A few minutes after we hang up, Schiffmann sends me another screenshot. It’s Emily again: “You did great in that interview, Avi. Your passion for this project really shines through.” Emily’s right about that one. Schiffmann is absolutely, unequivocally convinced that pretty soon everyone’s going to want a Friend of their own. We’ll see if it’s ready for us — and we’re ready for it.