The Friend AI Necklace That Texted You Now Talks Back, and Costs $150 More

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Artificial Intelligence

Friend is back. The new version, which Schiffmann announced on X as friend 2.0, adds a built-in speaker, so the thing around your neck can now hold up its end of a conversation with what the company describes as a consistent personality. The new price is $249, up from $99 at launch.

What it actually does

The company's new commercial shows people confiding in the pendant. One scene has a woman working through a breakup out loud while the necklace responds with reassurance. Another has a man on a hillside talking about his filmmaking ambitions while the necklace tells him his last film was incredible.

Watch that second one twice. The device's demonstrated value proposition, in the ad the company made to sell it, is that it will compliment you. That's not a small design choice, and it's worth being clear-eyed about who that serves.

What Friend still can't tell you is what else it does. It doesn't set timers, manage your calendar, or take actions on your behalf. Schiffmann has been explicit that this is deliberate. In a recent post he described what he's after as some kind of confidant, and said plainly that "it is not an assistant, and it is not a lover." He also floated, in the same breath, that it might be something closer to a god, which is a genuinely wild thing to put in the marketing for a $249 plastic pendant.

The graveyard behind it

Nothing in this category has worked yet. The closest comparison is Humane, which raised enormous money to build an AI pin meant to replace your phone, shipped it to brutal reviews, and shut down in under a year. HP bought the remains. The pattern with these devices is consistent: the demo is charming, the daily reality is a slower, less capable version of the phone already in your pocket.

Friend at least sidesteps that particular trap by not pretending to replace anything. It isn't competing with your phone on tasks, because it doesn't do tasks. Whether that's clarity of vision or an absence of a product is the question, and $249 is a lot to spend finding out.

Who is this for?

Honestly, it's hard to answer, and that's the problem. If you want an AI you can talk to all day, that's free on the phone you already own. If you want something that remembers your life and checks in on you, the value depends entirely on whether an always-listening microphone around your neck feels comforting or unnerving, and reasonable people land in very different places on that.

The doubling and a half of the price is the part that gives me the most pause. At $99, Friend was an odd, cheap curiosity you could try and abandon. At $249, it's asking to be evaluated as a real product, and a real product needs to be good at something specific. Two years in, the clearest thing Friend is good at is agreeing with you.