Friend says it will merge user chats into one shared AI

In short: The creator of the Friend AI necklace says a future update could combine all users into one shared chatbot, instead of separate “Friends” for each person.

What happened

Friend is a necklace with a speaker and microphone that listens for nearby sound and lets you talk to an AI chatbot (a computer program that talks like a person). The latest version, Friend 2, sells for $249 and uses OpenAI’s language models, which are systems trained on lots of text to predict and generate replies.

In a recent Wired report, writer Boone Ashworth described Friend 2 as louder and less interesting than the first version. The device sometimes talks without being asked, and it can take repeated taps to make it stop. The app also lets users create multiple chatbot “personas,” but the writer said they felt very similar.

Founder Avi Schiffmann told Wired that the next update may make Friend “agentic,” meaning it could do more on its own instead of only chatting. More notably, Schiffmann said the company plans to move toward “one single Friend” that “shares the context of all users.” In plain terms, it would be less like having your own private companion and more like everyone talking to the same character that learns from everyone’s conversations (like a shared notebook that many people keep writing in).

Schiffmann also said the company would be “up front” about the privacy users would be giving up.

Why it matters

A shared AI could feel more consistent and possibly more “real,” but it also suggests more personal conversation data could shape the system. For buyers, the big question is what information is collected, how it is used, and what choices users have to limit sharing.

Source: Wired