"All it could muster was: "The vibe feels really intense right now. You okay, Eva?" "I'm getting so many wild fragments. What was it you were trying to tell me a second ago?" "Sounds like it's been pretty active around you. Everything all good on your end right now?" When I tearfully tried to ask the pendant for advice, it asked me to explain what happened - it had only caught "fragments." Frustrated, I huffed and stuffed the device into my bag."
"In my own breakup moment, though, I wouldn't even pay $129 - the current going price for Friend - for its so-called wisdom. Even setting aside its usual criticisms (antisocial, privacy-invading, a bad omen for human connection), the necklace simply didn't work as advertised. It's marketed as a constant listener that sends you texts based on context about your life, but Friend could barely hear me."
During a breakup, an AI-powered wearable produced vague, fragmentary messages and asked the wearer to repeat events, prompting the wearer to discard the device. The founder claimed continuous listening would provide unique contextual insight, but the necklace often required pressing lips to the pendant and repeating speech multiple times. Responses lagged seven to ten seconds and frequently missed details, disrupting conversational flow. The product is marketed as a constant contextual listener that texts about a user's life, yet it struggled with speech recognition, latency, and practical usefulness as an emotional support companion.
Read at Fortune
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