is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter.She has more than 13 years of experience reporting on wearables, health tech, and more. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
The New York City subway is famous for its ads. Ask any New Yorker of a certain age, and they’ll tell you that Law & Order’s Jerry Orbach “gave his heart and soul to acting, and the gift of sight to two New Yorkers” by donating his eyes after death. We mourned as a city when dermatologist Dr. Zizmore, affectionately known as Dr. Z, retired and his rainbow-infused promises for clear, tight skin no longer graced our commutes.
New Yorkers are less than pleased with the latest viral subway ad campaign for Friend — an always-on AI wearable companion.
Some ads have been graffiti-ed with the scathing realness New York is known for. “Fuck AI,” reads one. “Surveillance capitalism” and “Get real friends” read others. “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died” is scrawled across several others.
It’s impossible to escape these ads in New York City.
Having worn a Friend for about a month, I’m inclined to agree.
The pitch for this $129 AI necklace is that it’s a “friend” that hangs out with you all day. There’s a mic that lets it listen in on all your conversations. Every once in a while, you’ll get a push notification with a running commentary of your day. If you want to interact with it, you press it as if it were one big button. There’s no speaker, so it doesn’t speak back to you. All of its interactions are texts in the Friend app or notification-based. You can ask it questions, but you’ll be disappointed if you’re hoping for ChatGPT-like answers. Friend never responds to anything in more than two or three sentences. And if you’re hoping it’ll give you to-do lists or a transcript of your conversations, it can’t do that either. It’s just always there if you’re feeling lonely. (Provided you charge it daily.)
Blorbo looks like a glowing AirTag on a shoestring.
... continue reading