Friend delays shipments of its AI companion pendant

friendA startup making a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be considered a digital companion has delayed the shipment of its first batch until Q3.

Friend planned to ship the device to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s no longer possible.

“As much as I want to ship in Q1 of this year, I still have refinements to make, and unfortunately you can only start building electronics when you’re 95% done with your design,” Shiffman said. said In an email to customers. “I anticipate that by the end of February, when our prototype is complete, we will begin our final sprint.”

An email I sent to all my friends pre-order customers: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4

— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025

Friend, which has a staff of eight engineers and $8.5 million in capital from investors including Paraplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it to spend $1.8 million in the domain name Friend.com. This fall, as part of what Schiffman called an “experiment,” Friends debuted a web platform on Friend.com that lets people talk to random instances of AI characters.

Reception was mixed. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz Note that That friend’s chatbots often inexplicably end conversations with anecdotes of trauma, including muggings and shootings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com on Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that “the ghost [his] The past” was “confounding him”.

In the email mentioned above, Schiffman also said that the friend would discontinue his chatbot experience.

“We’re thrilled that millions of people have been able to play with what I believe to be the most realistic chatbot out there,” Schiffman wrote. “It really proved our internal ability to manage traffic, and really taught us a lot about digital companionship… [But] I want us to focus only on hardware, and I realize that digital chatbots and physical companions don’t mix well.”

AI-powered companions have become a hot-button topic. Character.AI is a chatbot platform powered by Google accused In two separate cases of psychological harm to children. Some experts have expressed concern that AI companions could Isolation worsens By replacing artificial relationships with people, and creates harmful content Which can trigger mental health conditions.