Living alone in your thoughts can be difficult, especially as you trudge through life. A new gadget called “Friend” aims to put AI to good use dealing with that.
Technology can change lives and solve problems. It can replace your wallet, provide endless mobile reading, give you a never-ending buffet of entertainment, track your health and vitals, and keep you connected to pretty much anyone.
It can do almost anything. But one thing technology doesn’t always tackle well is loneliness. The idea of it.
Sure, we have wearables like the Apple Watch that can remind us to take a moment and have some calm, maybe even keep a journal entry, but they may not provide an answer for how to deal with loneliness.
Adult life is difficult. Trudging into adult-life can be just as difficult. You might be alone with your thoughts and needing to deal with life, and you might simply be just alone. Life isn’t always easy, and technology isn’t always equipped to deal with this sort of problem.
How do you fix loneliness with technology? Is it a screen? An endless doom scrolling of entertainment on a mobile to keep you distracted? Is it a reminder to keep using your social media because your friends and family are there?
Or is it something different?
A new gadget aims to answer that question with something that also aims to be different. Very different.
A companion gadget. Literally.
“Friend” is basically what the concept describes itself as. A small glowing pendant you wear with a microphone, a Bluetooth connection, and a button, it’s a wearable for your neck, and it comes with a name. It’s not a name you can give, but rather one it comes with.
That’s your first introduction to “Friend”, which I should stop using quotes with, largely because it aims to be just that: a friend.
“It’s always getting to know you,” said Jackson Gok, Founding Software Engineer at Friend. “As it’s passively listening, it’s really actively trying to understand you.”
Friend is a gadget that listens. It then uses AI from Claude AI to turn those thoughts into a sort of model that can talk to you, albeit only through your phone. The pendant listens, and when you press the button on Friend, you can actively ask your Friend a question. In either case, it will send the result with an app notification to your phone.
You might be wondering what the whole point of this is.
AI gadgets have begun to pop up, and most seemingly just find ways to link ChatGPT to your body in some way. Nothing’s latest earphones do just that, allowing you to ask a question and let ChatGPT find the answer. To an extent, Apple’s AirPods do that with Siri, only Siri is searching the web. In iOS 18 with Apple Intelligence, AirPods will likely gain some AI, as well.
Friend is a little different. It’s not going to find the answers to your problems. It’s not going to take into account current events. Instead, Friend will chime in with a bit of confidence, a bit of a boost. It’s designed to act like a friend who listens and chirps up, as opposed to a be-all, hear-all everything gadget.
Support, not service
That’s what Friend’s predecessor was: Tab.
“Before it was called Tab, and it was the same form factor: it was an always listening pendant, but it was more of an assistant, so it was something that would passively listen in the background,” said Gok.
The concept then evolved being an assistant into something that could assist with the feeling of being alone. Gok told Pickr that members of the team had problems with the loneliness epidemic, which helped Friend’s founder Avi Schiffman and the team come up with a way to help remedy that. To build a sort of support and less of a service.
“We realised after a while that we just kind of wanted someone to be there for us,” he said. “Someone to be supportive. Someone to talk to. Someone that felt like it knows you.”
“And we just followed the rabbit-hole of where that was where that would go: how can we feel more supported, feel more confident, in ourselves. It just ended up addressing that.”
A gadget to grow with
Building a friend as a gadget is complex, not just because of what it aims to do, but because of our obsession with upgrades. We upgrade and move on from gadgets fairly quickly. Phones live in our lives for a few years, and it’s much the same with wearables, too.
Friend could be different. It could end up being the gadget you grow with, due to its approach for to mental health.
It could be there with you at 16 when you start talking to dates to help build up some confidence. It might sit in your life listening and giving you feedback when you need it. And it might pop up later for your first big job interview or marriage proposal.
Everything is contained on the single device, so like a friend, you need to take care of it. Break or lose it, and you’ll need to have a new friend listen in seemingly from the beginning. It’s a wild idea.
“It’s the type of thing where it feels like a companion the whole way through.”
Something different
AI gadgets themselves don’t have a strong case. Of the two that have come out this year, both have seemingly been dead on arrival.
The Humane pin was never released in Australia, and probably for good reason: it looked for a sale almost immediately after the poor reviews piled on. Rabbit’s attempt was less expensive, but the reviews just as weak, and was later found out to be just a glorified Android program on a small gadget.
So far, the buzzword of AI in everything has proven to be a bit of a fizzer in actual physical hardware. It isn’t always that much better in software, either.
But Friend is intriguing because it aims to be something different. What’s more, its team is young and excited, drawn to a project with the power to change.
Avi Schiffman built the first website for tracking Covid cases online, and then built a website for helping people escaping the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. He has thus far focused on assistance, and Friend isn’t a dramatic leap from that: it aims to assist individuals mentally.
The team of engineers also includes many Australians, who like Gok were eager to join such an exciting project. Perth-born and raised, he joined a project that not only explored mental health, but also looks for ways to use AI positively.
It’s one that may end up being inspirational, too. While boosting your mental health, Friend’s engineer told Pickr that “to be young right now and in the tech space is the greatest time especially with AI-powered engineering.
To aspiring creators and engineers, he suggested working on the biggest thing they could think of.
“You really just need to give yourself permission to really be ambitious,” he said.
“It’s actually a lot easier than you think it is. I would highly recommend that people — especially young people in tech — to just really give it a go. Something ambitious, because it will be better than you think.”
Australian availability is on the cards
Ambitious could easily describe Friend. It’s also surprising.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, it won’t see launch in Australia initially. Like many things, the US is the perfect test market, set for release next year for $99 US.
Locally, that suggests Australians can expect to find a Friend around $159 to $179, depending on how much the final price is, but Australia is on the cards for a release.
However, Friend’s engineer did tell Pickr that it would be launched in Australia, and that our accents weren’t the problem.
He even showed us what his Friend Amy had to say, who was listening to our interview the whole time, just as it listens to everything in his life. At the end, she thought he smashed it, and she wasn’t wrong.
