Friend: Can an AI Device Combat loneliness?

New approaches to Generative AI, hardware devices and combating loneliness are emerging. Yet another AI devices comes out of Stealth.

Hello Everyone,

I like to cover AI devices, because eventually I think one day they’ll reach a point of helpfulness. That might take a while.

Friend is an AI-powered wearable companion that listens, responds, and supports you like a true friend. Pre-order today. This is not an endorsement but an exploration of Generative AI’s best use case to date. Read this article on the web for the best reading experience.

Can an AI device combat loneliness? Let’s look at the first commercial for the $99 necklace that is just made for constant companionship. In a world where many young people are nearly always online, what does constant companionship look like exactly?

It’s getting lonely out there. AI devices such as from Rabbit, Humane, Limitless, Bee AI and others are trying to put Generative AI’s capabilities into wearables, and mostly missing the mark. However companionship AI has been perhaps the strongest B2C use case of Generative AI’s brief hoopla. Engagement and immersion are higher on platforms like Character.AI, Replika and others similar to them. If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of those so what if we had that in the real world?

Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout who built a Webby Award-winning website that tracks COVID-19, is working on an AI device called Friend.

It’s 2024 and young people globally are less happy than they have been in decades. Might a device help them cope with these stressful times?

Rewriting Happiness in the Digital Age

Something weird has occurred in the 2020s. A common pattern of happiness and well-being has been disrupted. The U-shaped happiness curve dictates that “happiness rises initially to a peak around age 30 and then declines into midlife and then rises again after age 70,” according to David Blanchflower, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

But recently, researchers are seeing a major shift as young adults — ages 18 to 25 — report being less happy now than people in their 40s and 50s. The shift seems to have occurred starting around the year 2011. Read paper. My question is, can Generative AI be used to combat this new trend of less good vibes among young people? Clearly young people are having less face to face great friendships among their peers than in past generations with the rise of digital interactions. I’m not a happiness researcher, but I think about the impact of Generative AI a lot on well-being.

Friend is not a new concept. But one of these AI devices needs to catch on no? While Limitless felt dystopian (then called Rewind), and Windows spying on you doesn’t feel great (a product called Windows Recall), a pendant called friend sound a bit more cheerful right?

Angel and First Investors of Friend

Schiffmann has raised $2.5 million in funding at a $50 million valuation from investors like Caffeinated Capital’s Raymond Tonsing, Z Fellows founder Cory Levy, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Solana founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, Morning Brew CEO and co-founder Austin Rief, Jordan Singer, who works on AI efforts at Figma, and Google senior product manager Logan Kilpatrick (formerly at OpenAI).

Trailer for Friend AI Pendant

Researchers began to notice a decline of happiness in young people around 2011. “Beginning around 2011 there is a monotonic and declining cross-sectional association between well-being and age.” I think it’s fair to say that we should be trying to use AI to moderate the things that make us unhappy, while maximizing the things that do. The current array of products and wearables aren’t too good at that. While the first generation of young humans, people who grew up on their phones are emerging, they aren’t doing so great mental health and happiness wise.

Friend is in the shape of something all too familiar, and 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 (2022-2024).

“Always listening” is one of the main taglines of Schiffmann’s as yet unreleased AI device.

• We go into more depth for premium readers.

• The Friend has an onboard microphone that listens to everything happening around the wearer by default.

• You can tap and hold it to ask it a question, but sometimes it will send messages—commentary about the conversation you just had, for example—unprompted.

• It is powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model, which can engage in helpful conversation, offer encouragement, or rib you for being bad at a video game. Because why not?

The quest to put AI in our mobile devices, wearables and something that’s “always with us”, continues: