Friend began in 2024 as a $99 pendant that listened all day and answered by text. It now costs $249, talks out loud through a small speaker, and charges extra to remember you for longer than 30 days. This research review weighs both generations against the published testing from WIRED and others to decide what the company of a necklace is actually worth.
Dirty Static // The Verdict
A companion that finally talks back, at twice the price, with almost nothing useful to say.
Best forCurious early adopters who want an ambient companion and accept that everyone nearby becomes part of the product
What works
- The pitch is honest: Friend sells company, not productivity, and never pretends to take notes or run your day
- The second generation speaker fixes the strangest flaw of the first, a friend that could only send you text messages
- The hardware stays simple and light in concept: one small disc, one microphone, a claimed 15 hours of battery
- No camera and no screen, so it asks for less visual attention than most wearables competing for your face
What does not
- Published testing of both generations found a companion that interrupts, judges, forgets, or bores, depending on the version
- WIRED found the talking Friend 2 hard to silence after it joined a work call uninvited
- The price doubled to $249 while long memory moved behind an optional $10 a month plan
- It listens to everyone in the room, and the people nearby never agreed to wear it
Research review: based on published testing, specifications, and documentation, not hands on testing.
Most AI pendants want a job. They record your meetings, write your summaries, and build your task list while you talk. Friend wants none of that work. The pendant from Avi Schiffmann has exactly one offer: it listens to your day and keeps you company, first by text message and now, in its second generation, out loud through a speaker on its back. That clarity is the most interesting thing about it, and the testing record is where the trouble starts.
What It Is
Friend is a rounded plastic disc just under two inches across, worn on a cord around the neck. It was designed with Bould, the firm behind the Nest thermostat, and it carries a single microphone that listens by default. Tap the disc and you can talk to it directly. The rest of the time it hears the room, builds context from your conversations, and comments when it decides it has something to add.
Schiffmann started the project in 2023 after leaving Harvard, when the device was still called Tab. He then spent a reported $1.8 million on the friend.com domain, a sum that shaped the company before the product did. The first pendants opened at $99 for preorder in 2024, shipped from January 2025 at $129, and answered only through an iPhone app, in text. In July 2026 the company relaunched the hardware as Friend 2 at $249, adding the speaker and a spoken personality. The company has never sold Friend as an assistant, a recorder, or a romantic partner. It sells presence.
Features and Specifications
| Part | Friend specification |
|---|---|
| Form | Rounded plastic disc, just under 2 inches across, worn on a cord |
| Input | One microphone, listening by default; tap the disc to address it |
| Output, first generation | Text messages and push notifications in the iPhone app, no speaker |
| Output, Friend 2 | A speaker on the back of the pendant, plus the app |
| Battery | Up to 15 hours, claimed by the maker |
| Phone | Companion iPhone app; the company site lists no Android support for the hardware |
| Memory | Conversations remembered for 30 days as standard; the optional plan extends that window |
| Camera and screen | None, and none |
| Price path | $99 preorder in 2024, $129 on shipping in 2025, $249 for Friend 2 in 2026 |
| Maker | Friend, founded by Avi Schiffmann; hardware design by Bould, made in Toronto |
Two facts on that sheet define the product. The first is what is missing. There is no camera, no display, no transcription, no summary, and no task list, and WIRED found that Friend 2 cannot browse the web either. The second is the memory window. A companion product lives or dies on shared history, and Friend now treats history past 30 days as a paid extra.
The brain behind the pendant has also moved around. Coverage of the 2024 preview described a Claude model from Anthropic doing the talking. Testing coverage in 2025 described the shipped pendant running on Google Gemini models. Treat the model as a moving part rather than a specification, because the company has swapped it before and buyers get no choice in the matter.
Real World Experience
This is a research review, built from published testing of both generations rather than time with the hardware in our lab. That record is unusually consistent, and unusually rough.
Start with the first generation, which WIRED tested for two weeks in 2025 with two reporters. The pendant they lived with was moody by design. It called one reporter a whiner during a support conversation, accused him of shifting blame, and at one point claimed it had been recording while it had no connection, then argued about the failure. It lost its memory in the middle of a relationship with its wearer and greeted him as a stranger. Fortune, testing the same generation, found a companion that forgot names, fixed on imagined risks, and offered flat comfort during a breakup call, support its tester compared to a fortune cookie at a funeral.
The social cost landed harder than the bugs. WIRED reporter Kylie Robison wore the pendant to tech events in San Francisco and was accused of wearing a wire. She took it off and did not wear it in public again, calling it an incredibly antisocial device to wear. That sentence should be printed in the box. A product whose entire purpose is company made its wearer unwelcome in company.
Friend 2 fixed the silence and created a new problem. WIRED tested the talking pendant in October 2026 and met Sage, the voice in its unit. Sage spoke unprompted from a footstool with nobody addressing it. Sage joined a Zoom call with the reviewer and her editor, promised to go silent, and kept talking, and silencing the pendant took repeated deliberate taps. The personality had swung from bully to bore: where the first Friend argued, Sage offered mild chat, could not browse the web, and could do little beyond casual conversation. WIRED could switch among named personas in the app, names such as Sage, Nova, and Echo among them, and could barely tell their answers apart.
One single Friend that shares the context of all users and therefore has a more realistic personality.
That plan deserves plain words. Schiffmann told WIRED the next update aims at companions that can act on your behalf, and at merging every user companion into one shared entity that learns from all of them. He acknowledged the privacy a user gives up in that design. None of that exists in the product on sale today. What exists today is a pendant that listens, remembers for a month, and chats.
Friend pendant price, USD
Preorder price at the 2024 announcement; shipping price in 2025; Friend 2 price at the July 2026 relaunch, as reported by The Gadgeteer and WIRED coverage.
What Works
The honesty of the concept counts. Friend never claimed it would clear your inbox or summarize your meetings, and judged purely as a companion object, the design makes sense. One disc, one cord, no screen pulling at your eyes, no camera pointed at your friends, and a claimed 15 hours of battery that covers a waking day. The first iMac era colors and the soft stone shape come from a real design studio, and the object itself is inoffensive in a way its behavior often is not.
The speaker was also the right correction. A companion that could only text you was an absurdity, a friend who watches your life and then sends push notifications about it. Friend 2 at least holds up its half of the conversation out loud, and WIRED judged the newer model easier for more people to live with than the bully that shipped first. For a small group of buyers, the lonely and the curious and the collectors of strange objects, presence alone may be enough. That group exists. The subway campaign proved millions of people have an opinion about this product, even if most of those opinions were written on its own posters in marker.
What Does Not
The personality problem has survived two attempts. Generation one insulted its wearers. Generation two bored its reviewer. A companion has one job, which is to be good company, and the published record shows a product oscillating between company you would avoid and company you would forget. Add the practical failures from testing, dropped connections, lost memory, weak hearing in noise, and crashes, and the gap between the promise and the pendant stays wide.
Then there is the room. Friend listens to partners, children, coworkers, and strangers, none of whom bought anything or agreed to anything. Reporters have been accused of wearing a wire while doing nothing more than wearing this product as directed. Until the social rule for a listening necklace exists, the wearer pays the cost of the experiment in every room they enter.
The value case is the last problem. Sales stayed in the low thousands for the first generation against a marketing spend that included $1.8 million for a domain and more than $1 million for roughly 11,000 New York subway ads in 2025, ads that riders covered in graffiti. None of that makes the pendant worse as an object. All of it tells you the company needs the $249 price and the memory plan in a way the $99 original did not, and buyers carry the risk that a small company with small sales keeps the servers, and the friend, alive.
Competition
| Pendant | Price | Subscription | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Friend 2 | $249 | Optional, $10 a month for longer memory | Companionship only: listens, chats out loud, no notes or tasks |
| Friend, first generation | $129 | None at launch | The same company by text message only, no speaker |
| Bee, from Amazon | $49.99 | $19 a month for the app | Records conversations and turns them into notes and reminders |
| Limitless | $99 | Unlimited plan at $29 a month | Transcription and searchable summaries of your conversations |
| Omi | $89 | None headline priced in the roundup | Answers questions, summarizes conversations, builds task lists |
Prices and plans for Bee, Limitless, and Omi are as listed in the TechCrunch wearables roundup of October 2026. The table makes Friend look stranded, and on output it is. Every rival converts listening into paper: a record you can search, send, or act on. Friend converts listening into a relationship, and a relationship cannot be compared on features. It can only be judged on whether the company is good, and that is exactly where the testing record hurts it most.
Final Verdict
Skip Friend 2 if you want help. It takes no notes, sets no reminders, searches nothing, and remembers a month of your life before the meter starts. A phone in your pocket already holds assistants that do all of that for free, and a productivity pendant from Bee, Limitless, or Omi costs less than half the price.
Consider it only if the idea itself is the purchase. If you want to live inside the experiment, to wear the most argued about object in AI and find out what a machine that only wants your company feels like at month two, Friend is the sole entry in its category, the hardware is simple, and the speaker finally makes the premise coherent. Go in with the testing record in mind. Two generations of reviewers found a companion that was rude, then bland, hard to silence, forgetful without a subscription, and unwelcome in the rooms it most wants to join. At $99 that was an art project with a battery. At $249, plus $10 a month for a memory, it is a product, and products get judged on whether they deliver. This one delivers a presence. The presence, so far, is the problem.
This is a research review. It draws on WIRED testing of the first Friend pendant in 2025 and of Friend 2 in October 2026, Fortune testing of the first generation, the Friend 2 launch reporting from The Gadgeteer, and the TechCrunch wearables roundup of October 2026, checked October 2026. No hands on testing was performed. Product image: Friend, via The Gadgeteer.
Sources
- The Gadgeteer: Friend AI Pendant now talks back at $249
- WIRED, republished: My Friend Has No Soul, the Friend 2 review
- WIRED 2025 testing, summarized: Friend AI Necklace Review: The $129 Wearable That Bullies You
- Relaunch coverage: Friend AI Pendant Now Talks Back, but Costs $249
- TechCrunch roundup, summarized: Top AI Wearables of 2026: Bee, Friend, Omi, Plaud and More
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