The AI necklace that a chunk of New York wanted gone is back, and this time it talks. Friend, the pendant that listens to your day and pipes up with commentary, has re-launched with a speaker so it can reply out loud. It also costs twice as much.
The original Friend messaged you like a needy group chat of one. The new version, which founder Avi Schiffmann is calling “Friend 2.0,” adds spoken replies. That single feature has apparently doubled the price, from $129 to $249, The Verge reported.
The $249 buys the hardware outright, but there is a catch. Friend's memories of you last just 30 days unless you pay $9.99 a month to keep them. Its voice and personality are fixed, and the company pledges never to push an update that erases who a companion has become.
A quick recap, for the lucky
If you missed Friend the first time, here is the short version. Schiffmann's startup spent $1.8m of its $2.5m in funding just to buy the friend.com domain. It then covered the New York subway in adverts selling artificial companionship.
The city did not take it well. About nine months ago, protesters gathered to rail against the ads and the broader creep of always-on AI into human relationships. Friend was the most visible target in town, so it wore the backlash. Schiffmann leaned in, promoting the protest online and turning up to it in person.
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The pitch, and the problem
The relaunch ad shows two people confiding very personal problems to their pendants. That is the whole proposition. It is a wearable that is always listening, always ready to respond, and now always ready to talk back. It is companionship as a subscription, worn around the neck.
The trouble is that the core objection has not changed, only the volume. Critics of these devices, including Signal's Meredith Whittaker, keep making the same point: AI chatbots are not friends. A microphone on your chest, feeding a model that offers emotional support it cannot feel, raises the same privacy and dependence questions it always did.
Those questions are not going away. Young people are leaning on AI for conversation, and the public remains wary of exactly this kind of intimacy with a machine. Even China has started pulling its AI companions.
Schiffmann seems unbothered. He posted the new ad with the confidence of a founder who has decided that outrage is a marketing plan. Whether a talking, pricier Friend wins over the people who mocked the silent, cheaper one is the open question. “I'm sure things will go much better this time,” as The Verge put it, dryly.