Would you wear an ‘always-on’ AI chatbot buddy around your neck to keep you company?

Meet your newest ‘Friend’. Picture a small, white pendant – kind of like an Apple AirTag, about the size of a button large – enclosed in a necklace so it sits perfectly at your chest. It’s watching, listening, and ready to chat to you all day, every day.

A user wears their ‘Friend’, talks to it with the press of a button, and then the chatbot responds via text through the app.

The point of the ‘Friend’ is simply to keep people company, but what are the implications of technology you wear and talk to 24/7, and what does its creation say about who we are becoming as a society? 

On this episode of The Briefing, Sacha Barbour Gatt is joined by the lead engineer of Friend, Jackson Mowatt Gok, to explain why it's been created, and what he hopes it will achieve.

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