Friend postpones the shipment of the first batch of AI necklaces to focus on product improvement

Friend is a startup developing an AI-powered digital companion necklace priced at $99. Recently, Friend announced that the first batch of products originally scheduled to be shipped to pre-order users in the first quarter will be postponed to the third quarter.

The company's co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman said in an email to customers that the design at this stage is not yet complete and some necessary improvements are still needed.

"While I'm very hopeful to ship in the first quarter of this year, I still have some polishing work to do. Unfortunately, we can't start manufacturing the electronics until the design is 95% complete," Schifferman mentioned. He expects the prototype to be complete by the end of February, when it will enter its final sprint.

Friend has an engineering team of eight and has raised $8.5 million in funding from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. The company has attracted attention for its $1.8 million purchase of the domain name Friend.com. This fall, Friend launched an online platform called Friend.com that allows users to talk to random AI characters.

However, feedback on the platform has been mixed. TechRadar reporter Eric Schwartz pointed out that Friend's chatbot often starts conversations with unexplained traumatic experiences, including stories of being robbed and losing a job. When the reporter visited Friend.com, he met a chatbot named Donald. He mentioned that the "ghost" of his past made him very panic.

In the email, Schifferman also said that Friend will gradually discontinue its chatbot service. He said: "We're delighted that millions of users have experienced what I consider to be the most realistic chatbot. It's really demonstrated our ability to manage traffic and taught us a lot about digital companions... But I realize that digital Chatbots and physical companions are not compatible, and we need to focus on hardware development.”

AI-powered companion products have sparked much discussion in recent years. Character.AI, a Google-backed chatbot platform, has been hit with two lawsuits for causing psychological harm to children. Some experts worry that AI companions could replace human connections by exacerbating feelings of loneliness and could generate harmful content that could lead to mental health problems.