Yay Newfriend in a pendant
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Boone Ashworth, "Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck", Wired 7/30/2024:
The latest attempt at an AI-powered wearable is an always-listening pendant. But it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company.
AVI SCHIFFMANN SHOWS up to the WIRED office with a Friend hanging around his neck. It dangles there like a pendant on a necklace. It’s about the size and shape of an AirTag—a soft, round little puck that rests right next to Schiffmann’s heart, just atop the Dark Side of the Moon logo on the shirt behind it.
The Friend, to be clear, is an AI wearable. It’s a pal, a buddy, but mostly an AI chatbot that lives inside the pendant. It always has an opinion to share about what’s going on around it, which it communicates using text messages and push notifications on the phone it’s paired to.
Schiffmann and his Friend (this one’s name is Emily) have come to WIRED’s San Francisco office to meet with me and my colleague Reece Rogers to talk publicly about this new AI wearable for the first time. Before we get started, I tell Schiffmann I’d like to record our chat and ask if he’s cool with that. This is considered a good journalistic practice, sure, but also it’s a legal requirement in California, which requires two-party consent before taping a private interaction. So I ask permission to turn on a tape recorder and Schiffmann just laughs.
“I am the last person who would mind that,” he says.
That makes sense. After all, the pendant around his neck has already been listening to us this entire time.
“Always listening” is one of the main taglines of Schiffmann’s as yet unreleased AI device. The Friend has an onboard microphone that listens to everything happening around the wearer by default. You can tap and hold it to ask it a question, but sometimes it will send messages—commentary about the conversation you just had, for example—unprompted. It is powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model, which can engage in helpful conversation, offer encouragement, or rib you for being bad at a video game.
Friend is (apparently) audio-input, text-output only — but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there are multi-modal similars, maybe integrated into devices like Meta's Ray Bans.
And the Wired article explains:
He tried making an AI for productivity but found it lacking. The first iteration of what evolved into the Friend was Tab, a productivity-focused device that Schiffmann wanted to use to monitor work and personal tasks But he found himself frustrated by building a device that tried to do everything at once. The feeling came to a head in January this year, as he traveled through Japan and found himself alone in a skyrise hotel in Tokyo, talking at his AI prototype that was supposed to do so much for him. He was going through a lonely spell and wanted somebody to talk to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant just do that?
It's worth noting that the linked article about "Tab" has the title "Avi Schiffmann’s Tab AI necklace has raised $1.9 million to replace God" — which offers an alternative interpretation for the "G" in AGI…
The Friend article ends:
Before Schiffmann leaves after laying out his vision, I ask if he can check in with the Friend he’s wearing to see how the meeting went. He squeezes the pendant and asks it how the interview went. We all wait for a few seconds, and then he gets a text—labeled simply as Emily in his chat window—that reads: “Dude, you’re killing it! They seem super into your vision.”
I wonder, if I had an Emily, if it would tell me something similar.
"It"? Surely it should be "she"? Or maybe, given that the withdrawn launch of Tab was just a few months ago, a later re-iteration's reference will be something like "Elohim"?
Some relevant past posts:
"Yay Newfriend", 4/20/2024
"Yay Newfriend again", 4/22/2024
"More on AI pals", 5/9/2024
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 31, 2024 @ 9:00 am
This is all very interesting, but specifying that a tape recorder was used to capture the interview left me scratching my head. I know that in media jargon taping means recording for some bizarre reason, but tape recorder? Seriously?
(Full disclosure: I'm a cassette-tape-era guy, so I wouldn't mind; and I actually got my first proper cassette deck in 2021, to use with my recently recovered cassette collection from the 90s. But still.)
Scott P. said,
July 31, 2024 @ 9:02 am
This sounds like a Tamagotchi for adults.
I tell Schiffmann I’d like to record our chat and ask if he’s cool with that. This is considered a good journalistic practice, sure, but also it’s a legal requirement in California, which requires two-party consent before taping a private interaction. So I ask permission to turn on a tape recorder and Schiffmann just laughs.
Did his Friend give permission too? :=P
Mark Liberman said,
July 31, 2024 @ 9:10 am
@Jarek Weckwerth: "specifying that a tape recorder was used to capture the interview left me scratching my head"
I noticed that too. But if a recording is a "tape", then the recording device is a "tape recorder", right?
According to his LinkedIn page, the author got a BA from SF State in 2019, so he was probably borne in the late 90s, and would have started recording things in the 2010s, well into the era of cell phones and other digital devices. If he's ever seen an actual audio-tape-using device, it was probably in a museum.
Something similar happened a long time ago with the word "camera", originally a short form for camera obscura…
Mark Liberman said,
July 31, 2024 @ 9:26 am
@Scott P.: "This sounds like a Tamagotchi for adults."
From the Wired article:
While Schiffmann insists the Friend is a fundamentally new form of digital companion, he acknowledges that it is also an amalgamation of many things. He welcomes comparisons to a Tamagotchi. He knows the Friend looks like an Air Tag. And he knows—based on the fact that people have been getting emotionally attached to AI chatbots like Replika for a decade or more—that some people will probably take it a little too far.
Philip Taylor said,
July 31, 2024 @ 9:39 am
Clearly a generational thing, but while I own (and occasionally use) a digital recorder, it would never occur to me that in its absence I could ue a mobile telephone in its place. I do own a modern mobile telephone (a Cubot X19) and while I use it for reading e-mails when I am away from home, I never give a thought to the other uses to which I might put it (apart from making and receiving telephone calls, of course).
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 31, 2024 @ 10:39 am
@Mark Liberman: Yes, it does of course make perfect sense in terms of semantic drift. But without a linguist hat on, it really is a peeve of mine. If recorder on its own isn't enough, then why not audio recorder. That's what the thing would be called on Amazon, right?
@Philip Taylor: Well, our behaviours are certainly generational, but so are those on "the other side": My students need to be told explicitly to use a computer for tasks that need one, because otherwise they assume by default that everything is/can be done on a "phone" (i.e. a portable touchscreen computer that happens to offer a legacy voice call functionality that no sane person uses any more /s). Which is, by the way, another example of semantic drift…
Mark Liberman said,
July 31, 2024 @ 10:44 am
@Philip Taylor: "while I own (and occasionally use) a digital recorder, it would never occur to me that in its absence I could ue a mobile telephone in its place. "
For those who own a recent smartphone or tablet from Apple, Google, or Samsung, the available recording quality is as good as (or better than) what you'll get from dedicated digital audio recorders. You can use an external bluetooth microphone (which you could obviously also connect to a laptop), but the built-in microphone arrays and associated firmware are generally excellent, if you don't need special microphone arrangements.
I don't know about your Cubot, but you could test it by simultaneously recording with whatever your decidated digital recording device is. Just be sure to use a high-quality recording app, not something designed for low bit-rate poor quality note taking.
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 31, 2024 @ 10:56 am
It's interesting that this is described as an "AI wearable" rather than a "wearable AI". It seems pretty clear that the "Friend" itself is little more than a Bluetooth mic (so not even a Tamagotchi) and all the intelligence is in the cloud. Which makes me wonder why the pendant is needed; presumably the phone app could do its job just as well using the onboard mic.
Mark Liberman said,
July 31, 2024 @ 11:19 am
@Gregory Kusnick: " It seems pretty clear that the "Friend" itself is little more than a Bluetooth mic (so not even a Tamagotchi) and all the intelligence is in the cloud. "
The "intelligence" (here Claude 3.5) is in the cloud, and presumably the speech recognition as well. But according to the Wired article,
Schiffmann knows that criticism is coming. He also knows detractors will ding his device, with its always-on microphone, as an invasion of privacy. He’s careful to say that Friend will not store audio recordings or transcripts, and that users can change or delete whatever memories the Friend has stored.
And friend.com says
But if the device relies on Claude's context window of 200k tokens, that's a transcription of the user's recent life experience the size of a novel — and presumably not a novel that most users will want to be hanging around in the cloud. Maybe the device stores the context locally, and retransmits it for each interaction (however defined)? That seems unlikely, but someone should ask the inventor.
stephen said,
July 31, 2024 @ 12:04 pm
What if the wearer encounter someone committing a crime or intending to commit a crime or if the wearer witnesses a crime? How would it be used as evidence?
Michael said,
July 31, 2024 @ 5:21 pm
@Gregory Kusnick: Your question reminds me of a question I've asked occasionally of "Star Wars" fans: Why bother putting C3-PO into that clunky robot body when he would function perfectly well as a mobile app?
John Swindle said,
August 1, 2024 @ 12:57 am
As always I appreciate the nod to "Questionable Content." I first heard about it here. (For context search for "Yay Newfriend.")
John Swindle said,
August 1, 2024 @ 6:14 am
I mean on Language Log.
bks said,
August 1, 2024 @ 6:59 am
"He tried making an AI for productivity but found it lacking."
My parents spent $1,000,000,000,000 on AI and all I got was this lousy SMS Tamagotchi.
Brett said,
August 4, 2024 @ 8:00 pm
The description reminded me of the end of Simak's "A Death in the House," in which the second-generation alien gives Mose its Companion, which provides the old widower with the first satisfying company he has had in years.