If you’ve ever wanted jewelry that records conversations with your friends, transcribes them, and gives you ideas for follow-up, it’s your lucky day. Based Hardware is launching “Friend,” an AI necklace that helps you remember people you meet, conversations you’ve had, and commitments you’ve made.
For people with shockingly bad memories for people and names like me, it sounds perfect. Of course, there is the creep factor: more about that in a moment.
Friend is a $97 microphone that looks like jewelry. Wear it around your neck, and it will listen to your conversations all day long, whether in person or on Zoom. With the help of ChatGPT, it will summarize those conversation, extract action items, and maintain an updated profile for your friends and colleagues with relevant information such as “just moved” or “going to the party at Jason’s house.”
“It transforms your conversations into memories and proactive insights,” says Based Hardware CEO and Founder Nik Shevchenko.
All of the data is stored locally on your phone on the Friend device companion app, according to Based Hardware, making the device privacy safe on your end. Friend lights up when recording so friends and colleagues theoretically will know when their voice is being recorded. (Courteous people will probably also mention that they are recording all their conversations.)
The Friend device has six-day battery life, a microphone for audio capture, Bluetooth to connect to your phone, and 5-second transcription. It is available now in a developer version that costs $68, and is available for pre-order for $70.
Friend will not retain conversations, but of course the transcripts will live on in the app in your phone. The Friend app will supply AI-powered suggestions, acting as a conversation coach (don’t say “um” so much) and can auto-create calendar items for events you talk about attending.
Based Hardware says it will ship the consumer product in the fourth quarter of 2024.
“When we show the Friend device, at least 20% of people ask us immediately how to buy it,” said Shevchenko, who is a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship prize, a $200,000 ‘scholarship’ for founders who chose to skip higher education. “So far, 1,500 units have been sold, with 1000 already delivered to developers and influencers.”
Essentially, what you have is a ChatGPT appliance: a potentially more interesting piece of AI hardware than the Rabbit R1 or the AI Pin from Humane. It’s an incarnation of an omnipresent AI in our lives that helps us remember, sort, organize, and act on all the information that we come into contact with.
It’s also a potential privacy nightmare and, perhaps, a relationship killer. And yet another step to a world that we nudge closer and closer to every day, where nothing is private, everything is public, and everything is recorded.
For starters, how would you change your conversations if you knew everything was being recorded? Would you tell the same jokes, answer the same way, or worry that some things you say might be taken out of context and used against you at some point? Or would you just freeze up and not speak normally, aware that you’re essentially on-stage and under AI-powered scrutiny?
Audio is just the first step, Shevchenko says:
“A necklace is just the first step. Future directions include the addition of video, a brain-computer interface, and new formats such as smart glasses, earbuds, and other wearables that people find the most comfortable and unobtrusive.”
It’s an interesting device. I want the superpowers it promises to deliver: always remembering names, never forgetting a party invitation, remembering all the great ideas you had, or the wonderful conversations you engaged in. So do many others, apparently: Friend achieved 10 times its goal on Kickstarter for the initial version of the product, with 712 backers pledging $49,868 to develop this product.
I’m just not sure I want the world that this conjures into existence. Even though it appears to be inevitable.
