Buddy, a startup making a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be handled as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments till Q3.
Buddy had deliberate to ship units to pre-order clients in Q1. However in keeping with co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s now not possible.
“As much as I would liked to have shipped in Q1 of this year, I still have refinements to do, and unfortunately you can only start manufacturing electronics when you are 95% done with your design,” Schiffman stated in an electronic mail to clients. “I estimate that by the end of February, when our prototype is complete, that we will begin our final sprint.”
An electronic mail I despatched out to all Buddy preorder clients: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025
Buddy, which has an eight-person engineering workers and $8.5 million in capital from traders together with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it spent $1.8 million on the area identify Buddy.com. This fall, as a part of what Schiffman referred to as an “experiment,” Buddy debuted an internet platform on Buddy.com that allowed individuals to speak to random examples of AI characters.
Reception was blended. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz famous that Buddy’s chatbots typically inexplicably kicked off conversations with anecdotes of traumas, together with muggings and firings. Certainly, when this reporter visited Buddy.com Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that the “ghosts of [his] past” had been “freaking him the f— out.”
Within the above-mentioned electronic mail, Schiffman additionally stated that Buddy can be winding down its chatbot expertise.
“We’re glad that millions got to play around with what I believe to be the most realistic chatbot out there,” Schiffman wrote. “This has really proven our internal ability to manage traffic, and has really taught us a lot about digital companionship … [But] I want us to stay focused on solely the hardware, and I have realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions don’t mix well.”
AI-powered companions have turn into a hot-button subject. Character.AI, a chatbot platform backed by Google, has been accused in two separate lawsuits of inflicting psychological hurt on kids. Some consultants have expressed issues that AI companions may worsen isolation by changing human relationships with synthetic ones, and generate dangerous content material that may set off psychological well being circumstances.
