A friend is delaying the shipment of his AI-powered pendant

frienda startup creating a $99 AI-powered necklace designed to act as a digital companion has delayed its first shipment until Q3.

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

“As much as I’d like to ship in Q1 of this year, I still have some refinements to make, and unfortunately you can only start manufacturing electronics when you’re 95% done with your design,” Schiffman said. he said in an email sent to customers. “I estimate that by the end of February, when our prototype is complete, we will start our final sprint.”

My email to all customers who pre-ordered a friend: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4

— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025

Friend, which has an eight-person engineering team and $8.5 million in capital from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows as it did so. spent $1.8 million on the domain name Friend.com. This fall, as part of what Shiffman calls an “experiment,” Friend debuted a web platform on Friend.com that lets people talk to random samples of AI characters.

The reception was mixed. Eric Schwartz of TechRadar noted Friend’s chatbots often started conversations inexplicably with anecdotes of trauma, including robberies and shootings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com on Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that “ghosts of the past” were “haunting” him.

In the aforementioned email, Schiffman also said that Friend would discontinue the chatbot experience.

“We’re excited to see millions of people get to play with what I believe is the most realistic chatbot out there,” said Schiffman. “It really proved our internal ability to drive traffic and taught us a lot about digital companionship… (But) I want us to focus on the hardware, and I realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions mix well.” .”

AI companions have become a hot button topic. The chatbot platform powered by Google has been Character.AI accused in two separate cases involving psychological harm to children. Some experts have expressed concern about the possibility of AI companions deteriorates the insulation replacing human relationships with artificial ones, and creates harmful content can trigger mental health conditions.