The idea is so similar to an episode of Black Mirror that the reactions on X and YouTube have been instantaneous. It even seems like a joke, but it is not. An American startup wants to sell you a friend for 93 euros. A friend that has the form of a pendant and can listen to what is happening around it to talk to you via chat.
The founder of the project, Avi Schiffmann, published the trailer for this strange product on X on July 30. In it, you can see people in various situations, either alone or accompanied, in which they wear a smart pendant that keeps them company in the form of messages that appear on their mobile phone. The device is able to know what the person is doing at that moment, whether it is taking a walk in nature or playing video games, and makes comments on what is happening as if it were a person standing next to us.
As seen in the video, the user presses the button on the pendant to talk to the virtual “friend”, to which he receives a response from the friend on his phone. In the examples shown in the teaser, the AI can ask you how the food is, express joy at being in the middle of nature, comment on the quality of a series or warn you that your friend is beating you in the video game you are playing.
The X-rated video has more than 10 million views, and on YouTube, the product presentation has a huge number of ‘dislikes’: 2.2 thousand dislikes compared to only 568 likes. It is not difficult to see why many people have disliked the proposal. It seems taken from an episode of Black Mirror in which interaction between humans is so worn out that it is necessary to resort to relationships with machines. But the criticism does not only come from that side; the user @antoineweb1, for example, criticizes the probably disappointing operation of the machine, summarizing it as “basically, a bluetooth microphone that listens to everything you say and sends it to a ChatGPT container.”
And although the product is still in pre-sale and therefore no one has tried it yet, it is easy to think that a product like this could suffer the same fate as others launched in recent months such as the Rabbit r1. That is, artificial intelligence products that promised some kind of paradigm shift, only to end up in great disappointment because they are based on some kind of combination with ChatGPT that is extremely limited in practice.
Always listening to you
According to their website, when the device is connected via Bluetooth, it goes into “always listening” mode, meaning that this digital friend is always watching what is happening and can freely decide when to talk to you or say something to you. In reality, the device needs to be connected to a phone to work, and it also requires an Internet connection (because it will have to send the information to the ChatGPT server or another AI). In fact, at the moment it is only compatible with iPhone, although they say that they are preparing compatibility with Android for the near future.
Shipping is currently limited to the United States and Canada, and the price is $99. It remains to be seen whether the product will turn out to be something interesting that defies the very negative expectations. Many are already eagerly awaiting a review by famous tech critic Marques Brownlee, who has already commented on X about the announcement, expressing his surprise that it was not a parody.
