Everyone Hated Friend’s AI Necklace, So It Came Back at Double the Price
Friend, the AI-companion pendant that New York protesters tried to shout down last year, has relaunched with a speaker and doubled its price to $249. Founder Avi Schiffmann is calling it “Friend 2.0.” The privacy and dependence objections that dogged the first version have not changed; they have just gotten louder.
July 30, 2026 – 5:18 pm
Image by: Friend
The original Friend messaged you like a needy group chat of one. The new version, “Friend 2.0,” adds spoken replies, reportedly doubling the price from $129 to $249.
The $249 buys the hardware outright, but there’s 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 those who missed Friend the first time:
Schiffmann’s startup spent $1.8m of its $2.5m in funding just to buy the friend.com domain. It then covered New York’s subway in ads 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, so it wore the backlash. Schiffmann leaned in, promoting the protest online and turning up to it in person.
The Pitch, and the Problem
The relaunch ad shows two people confiding very personal problems to their pendants. It is a wearable that listens always, responds always, and now talks back. Friend is companionship as a subscription, worn around the neck.
The core objection has not changed; critics, 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 remains to be seen. “I’m sure things will go much better this time,” as The Verge put it, dryly.