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 response to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s now not possible.
“As a lot as I might appreciated to have shipped in Q1 of this yr, I nonetheless have refinements to do, and sadly you may solely begin manufacturing electronics if you end up 95% carried out along with your design,” Schiffman stated in an e mail to clients. “I estimate that by the top of February, when our prototype is full, that we are going to start our closing dash.”
An e 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 title Buddy.com. This fall, as a part of what Schiffman known as an “experiment,” Buddy debuted an online 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 usually 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] previous” had been “freaking him the f— out.”
Within the above-mentioned e mail, Schiffman additionally stated that Buddy could be winding down its chatbot expertise.
“We’re glad that thousands and thousands obtained to mess around with what I imagine to be probably the most reasonable chatbot on the market,” Schiffman wrote. “This has actually confirmed our inner capability to handle site visitors, and has actually taught us rather a lot about digital companionship … [But] I need us to remain centered on solely the {hardware}, and I’ve realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions don’t combine effectively.”
AI-powered companions have develop 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 youngsters. Some specialists have expressed issues that AI companions might worsen isolation by changing human relationships with synthetic ones, and generate dangerous content material that may set off psychological well being circumstances.
