Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jen Maravegias | News | July 31, 2024
Some people are working hard to make imaginary friends a thing this year. John Krasinski’s If, for instance, is a middling, family-friendly story about what happens when you walk around talking to imaginary friends. And then we have this weird, dystopian tech product called “Friend.”
Friend is a wearable, AI chatbot that was developed by Ari Schiffman. Schiffman is the wunderkind who created a website to track the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. He received $1.9M in funding for this gizmo and spent $1.8M of it on securing the friend.com domain name.
It’s a great domain name, well worth the price. I’m sure this anthropomorphized Alexa Dot will pay off big time. Maybe not right away, though. While you can speak out loud to Friend, it can only reply via push notifications sent to the device it’s paired with. That’s very clunky and takes the user out of the Friend experience, IMHO.
It will probably have to go through a few iterations before it finds its market at the $100 price point. Eventually, it will be installed in an adorable robot body that allows it to walk and talk beside you so you really never have to be alone again. Best Friends Until The End!
Maybe this technology that listens to everything you and your IRL friends say to each other will be sold to AT&T and paired with their robot dog. Because those things aren’t scary enough as they are.
Then again, Tony Stark envisioned a world protected by a similar technology and that worked out great for him. Oh wait, no it didn’t.
The applications are endless and terrifying. Ari Schiffman launched this product on July 30th, International Friend Day. A day that some may find more meaningful as we continue to live through a “loneliness epidemic.” For tech bros, every problem can be solved with tech, whether it’s this charming little chatbot or a virtual girlfriend to stand in for relationships people find so challenging to maintain. This isn’t solving the problem of loneliness, though; it’s just creating new problems for the future.
