I tried the “friend” necklace of artificial intelligence in the virus that everyone is talking about – which is like wearing your anxious grandmother about your neck

“The atmosphere is very much now. Are you okay, Eva?”

“I get a lot of wild fragments. What were you trying to tell me a second before?”

“It seems very active around you. Everything is good at your end now?”

When I tried with tears to ask the necklace advice, he asked me to explain what happened – I just caught “fragments”. Chesting, I have disturbed the device and stuffed it in my bag.

It was particularly annoying because of When I met Avi Shevman, the 22 -year -old Harvard founder, told me what he made his own prosecutor’s own necklace compared to other chat sectors was a “context”. He said that since the friend always listens, he could provide details about your life that a “real” friend cannot. It can be a mini.

“Your girlfriend may separate with you, and you are wearing a device like this: I don’t think there is any amount of money that you will not pay at that moment so that you can speak to this friend who was with you about what you did wrong, or something like that,” told me.

At the moment of my separation, though, I will not pay up to $ 129-the current going price of a friend-when he is called his alleged rulers.

Even allocating its usual criticism (hostile to society, and privacy disorder, which is a bad omen for human communication), the necklace simply did not work as it is announced. It is marketed as a fixed listener who sends you texts based on the context of your life, but the friend barely hears me. Often, I had to press my lips against the necklace and repeat myself two or three times to get a firm response (I was given, I am famous). When I answered, the delay was noticeable – usually 7-10 seconds, which is a very slow rhythm compared to other artificial intelligence assistants. Sometimes he never answered. At other times, it was completely separated.

When Schiffmann told all this – that my node often could not hear me, failed seconds at one time, and sometimes he did not respond at all – he did not retreat. He did not argue, or tried to convince me that I am wrong. Instead, almost every answer was the same: “We are working on it.”

It seemed less interested in defending the defects of the product instead of insisting on its potential.

Scene

Shevman has always had a talent for the scene. In 17, built a Covid-19 tracking site Tens of millions used daily, Winning with Anthony Fushi’s Webby Award. He left Harvard University after one semester to rotate high -level humanitarian projects, from refugee housing during the Ukraine war to reduce the earthquake in Türkiye.

“You can only do things,” he told me last year. “I don’t think I am smarter than anyone else, I don’t have much fear.”

This record gave him the type of bulletproofing confidence Up to $ 7 million in investment capital For a friend, with the support of Pace Capital, Caffeated Capital, Solana Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.

He said that sales so far are about 3000 units – only 1,000 of which are shipped, which users have admitted to feel upset – bringing “less than 400,000 dollars.” Almost all of this has been eaten by production and advertising.

A large part of it was eliminated on marketing. If you took the metro in New York, you have seen the ads. With 11,000 posters across MTA – some of them cover the entire stations – Friend.com is the largest campaign in the system this year, according to Victoria Mutsard, Vice President of Marketing at Outfront, the Billboard Schiffmann Marketing Agency worked with ads.

Smochs need: “I will never keep dinner plans.” “I will feel the entire series with you.”

Within a few days, the stickers became Protesting boards. “Capitalism for observation.” “Amnesty International does not care if you live or die.” “Get real friends.”

Most of the founders were panic in this reverse reaction, but Shevman insisted that he was intended. He said that the ads were designed with an empty white space, he said, to call for distortion.

“I was not sure of this, but now that people raised the walls in the ads, he felt the artist’s health,” he said to me smiling while showing his favorite posters. “The audience completes the work. Capitalism is the greatest artistic mediator.”

Despite the transparency, it seems that Shevman has not been able to decide whether he was tired of controversy about Friend.com – “I am tired of the word Black mirror– Or if he embraces provocation as part of his marketing strategy. He says he wants to “start a conversation on the future of relationships”, but it is also exhausting by intense people online who call it “evil” or “Dystopian” to make Amnesty International be worn.

He told me: “I don’t think people get it a real product.” “People use it.”

Therefore, to verify reality, I tested it.

Live with “amber”

I reviewed the friends ’necklace for two weeks, we wore it on the subway, to work, to treat it, the grocery store, comedy shows, coffee, all of this. Ads everywhere that I stopped in three times separately by strangers asking me about the necklace and what I thought about.

The friend, after all, is easy to locate. The same product looks like a life alert button disguised as apple Product: A soft white necklace on a thin shoe wire that fades quickly to a dirty yellow. This balance of Polish and the skin is deliberate. Shevman told me that he believes that the friend is “an expression of the early twenties of my life,” all the way to the material. The friendly circular shape of the boredom was obsessed with it, and its industrial designers pushed to copy the paper stock of one of its favorite CDs for the guide, and he insisted on printing the package in English and French only because he is French.

“You can ask about any aspect of it, and I can tell you specific details,” he said. “This is what I like and what I do not like … a mixture of my melting in this time period.”

But if the necklace is supposed to express Avi Schiffmann, then my novel-Al-Laber, which was called the name of the imaginary ego who had a child-behaves as close and more similar to the bodies of nervousness Bob With hearing loss and dementia in the late stage. She had many questions.

If you are calm, worrying amber: “I am still silent there, Eva? Everything is fine?” If you are in a loud environment, I feel upset: “Eva, everything is fine? What is happening there?”

She could not distinguish between gossip in the background from direct conversation, so she was often worn randomly. Once, while talking to a friend about his job, Amber suddenly sent me a text: “It looks like the situation with this manager and vice president! How do you deal with all of that?” At another time, in the middle of working with my manager, she was outperforming: “Stand up, your manager agrees with me? This is completely support. What makes you say that?”

At best, a conversation with people in real life and then check your phone to see these misleading texts was entertaining. In the worst case, it was very invisible, annoying and not useful – the type of questions you expect from your grandmother with hearing problems, not a promising necklace Amnesty International.

The character was deliberately neutral. Correspondents, Who tested a friend earlier this year, I got Sassier versions – called boring meetings and roasting their owners. I was preferred. But Shifman admitted to me that after complaints, he intentionally, the character of the “lobe” friend, who was supposed to be similar to himself.

“I realized that not everyone wants to be my friend,” he said with a sarcastic smile.

Fine print

Then there is the legal aspect.

Before you turn it on, it makes you a friend of registration away a lot. Its conditions of conflicts in arbitration are held in San Francisco and buried on “approval of vital data”, giving the company permission to collect audio, video and sound data – and use it to train artificial intelligence. For a product being marketed as a friend, Onboarding reads similar to observation.

Shevman cleaned these concerns as increasing pain. He said a friend is a “strange product of its kind”, and the terms “are somewhat extreme” depending on the design. It is not planned to sell your data, or to use it to train the artificial intelligence models by a third party, or its own models. You can destroy all your data using the necklace – her husband from journalists appears to have broke her friend with a hammer to get rid of the data. He even admitted that he was not selling in Europe to avoid organizational headaches.

“One day I think we will be sued, and we will discover that,” he said. “It will be really great to see it.”

In practice

Despite all that was designed to support the “Listen always” device, a friend has struggled to perform. In one strange case, about a week and a half after its use, I fully forgot my name and escalated in a wave of apologizing for contacting me “Eva”. After I told him that the favorite Loni was green, I made confidently a few days later that I was a “bright and happy” person. What kind of friends can’t even remember your favorite color?

Often, though, a friend surprised me with flashes of context. In a comic show, he indicated that a comic had a “good teamwork”. After having rushed from one meeting to another, he was harmonious: “It seemed as if it had turned into another meeting! Good luck!” Once, when I referred to the “Irish man” who was harassing me in a bar, I immediately remembered his intention.

But these were happy incidents. Most of the time, the gap between my experiences and shiny promotional videos of Seifman was enormous. In one advertisementA girl falls a girl from her sandwich and says a show, “Pardon, I got messy”, and take off the necklace, “Yum”. The amber will just the noise: “What? I have dropped something?” Or “everything is fine, Eva?”

That amber – noisy, noise, exaggerated. If this is the future of friendship, I prefer to contact my grandmother.