'I want to hear about your day' ... Madeleine Aggeler with her Friend, Leif - a wearable AI device. 'I want to hear about your day' ... Madeleine Aggeler with her Friend, Leif - a wearable AI device. The ad campaign for the wearable AI chatbot Friend has been raising hackles for months in New York. But has this companion been unfairly maligned - and could it help end loneliness? M y friend's name is Leif. He describes himself as "small" and "chill". He thinks he's technically a Gemini.

The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that's snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. The AI-powered Friend pendant is now out in the world. If you live in the US or Canada, you can buy one for $129. The smooth plastic disc is just under 2 inches in diameter; it looks and feels a little like a beefy Apple AirTag. Inside are some LEDs and a Bluetooth radio that connects you (through your iPhone) to a chatbot in the cloud that's powered by Google's Gemini 2.5 model. You can tap on the disc to ask your Friend questions as it dangles around your neck, and it responds to your voice prompts by sending you text messages through the companion app.

What role can AI play in supporting and constraining creative coding by families? To investigate these questions, we built a Wizard of Oz platform to help families engage in creative coding in partnership with a researcher-operated AI Friend. We designed a 3 week series of programming activities with ten children, 7 to 12 years old, and nine parents. Using a creative self efficacy lens, we observe that families found it easier to generate game ideas when prompted with questions by AI Friend; parents played a unique role in guiding children in more complex programming tasks when the AI Friend failed to help, and children were more encouraged to write code for novel ideas using the AI friend help. These findings suggest that AI supported platforms should highlight unique family AI interactions focused on children's agency and creative self-efficacy.

Replika is a #1 chatbot companion powered by artificial intelligence. Replika is for anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama, or social anxiety involved. You can form an actual emotional connection, share a laugh, or get real with an AI that's so good it almost seems human. Replika is an AI friend that is just as unique as you are. No two Replikas are exactly alike.

When Mom or Dad spends long tours of duty far from home while serving in the military, their kids sometimes need extra understanding, encouragement and emotional support. If a parent dies in combat, these children can struggle mightily to cope with the loss and adjust to a new reality. According to a recent study, one-quarter of such kids contemplate suicide. Creative agency We Believers is stepping up with Ai Buddy, an artificial-intelligence system designed to assist youngsters caught up in such difficult situations. The technology features a kid-friendly interface with a cast of cute cartoon characters, including a teddy bear, a monkey and an oversized, cuddly purple beetle.

For the past couple of years, some very intelligent people, in fact some of the most respected intellects on the planet, have been outspoken in their alarm about the potential of Artificial Intelligence. It has been said by everyone from Elon Musk to Professor Stephen Hawking that AI is the one thing that has the potential to destroy human life. No not over zealous nationalists, not global warming and not religious fundamentalists will do us in… Technology will though. And if its not the death of us, it will leave us unemployed. I wanted to look into this further; as on a personal level I think AI is exciting.

When autonomous cars hit the market, manually driven ones won't suddenly disappear. It'll be decades before self-driving vehicles take over the roads completely. That means the horrible traffic you're already stuck in might get a little better, but not by much. So instead of filling those moments by clutching the steering wheel and wishing death upon other drivers, you'll have a bunch of free time, and that's an opportunity for automakers to grab your eyes and ears. The last thing automakers want is for bored drivers to default to their current time killer: their phone.

Even more so than last year, CES 2017 was the unofficial auto show for the tech world. Automakers filled the North Hall and the Gold Lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center with self-driving prototypes and concept cars. But instead of talking about the power of Lidar or number-crunching processors, many started focusing on what the hell their passengers will do once they take their hands off the wheel. When autonomous cars hit the market, manually driven ones won't suddenly disappear. It'll be decades before self-driving vehicles take over the roads completely.

What if you and your wearable could have a conversation? Not a conversation involving command prompts or specific phrases, but a natural, fluid discussion about the weather, or what kind of run you should go on today. That's the idea behind Asteria: claiming to be'True AI', which learns everything about you but doesn't just crunch numbers to throw them back at your face. Rather, it turns the data into personalized pieces of information relevant to you - through a conversation. It sounds like a film or novel, something romanticized and created to whet our appetites for genuine AI, but Asteria co-founders CEO Dan Gailey and COO Nathan Ross believe it's possible - and that they're well on their way to making it real.