Friend, the lonely AI wearable, returns with a new voice and a much bigger price tag
Two years ago, tech founder Avi Schiffmann launched Friend, an AI wearable that you could talk to, and that would send you text messages about your day. The idea, ostensibly, was to use artificial intelligence to combat loneliness. This week, the company announced a new overhaul of the product, introducing a noticeable upgrade: a voice.
- ▪Two years ago, tech founder Avi Schiffmann launched Friend, an AI wearable that you could talk to, and that would send you text messages about your day.
- ▪The idea, ostensibly, was to use artificial intelligence to combat loneliness.
- ▪This week, the company announced a new overhaul of the product, introducing a noticeable upgrade: a voice.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/friend-the-lonely-ai-wearable-returns-with-a-new-voice-and-a-much-bigger-price-tag/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:44:16 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T19:47:29.551Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T19:47:29.551Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | LGAXJDetb57w · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Two years ago, tech founder Avi Schiffmann launched Friend, an AI wearable that you could talk to, and that would send you text messages about your day. The idea, ostensibly, was to use artificial intelligence to combat loneliness. This week, the company announced a new overhaul of the product, introducing a noticeable upgrade: a voice. “Introducing friend 2.0,” Schiffmann tweeted Thursday. Friend now comes with a built-in speaker that can project a unique and consistent personality to its user. A new commercial for the wearable shows a woman wearing a Friend and talking to it about what is presumably her ex-girlfriend. “It’s not bad to be gay,” the necklace tells her. The video then switches to a man standing on a hillside discussing his filmmaking ambitions with his Friend.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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