Friend's AI pendant now talks back — and costs $249, twice the original price

The AI companionship startup Friend is back with a hardware revamp that adds a speaker, letting its pendant actually talk to you instead of just sending text messages. That upgrade comes with a steep price hike: the device now costs $249, nearly double the original $129. Founder Avi Schiffmann posted what he called a “Friend 2.0” ad on X this morning, showing users unloading personal problems to their pendants and getting verbal responses. The company is leaning hard into the pivot, even though the product name on its site hasn’t changed.

This relaunch lands roughly nine months after a protest in New York City singled Friend out as a symbol of tech-fueled disconnection. Schiffmann didn’t just acknowledge that protest — he posted about it and showed up himself. The backlash stemmed partly from Friend’s aggressive marketing blitz, which famously included dropping $1.8 million of its $2.5 million seed round on the domain friend.com and blanketing subway stations with ads for artificial companionship.

The speaker addition marks a significant shift in how the device operates. Before, interactions were one-way — you’d speak to the pendant, and it would text back to your phone. Now it responds out loud, making the whole experience more ambient and, arguably, more invasive. Whether consumers who recoiled at the initial vision will pay double for a chattier version is an open question.

Schiffmann seems unfazed by the earlier ridicule. The “Friend 2.0” branding suggests he sees this as an iterative step forward, not a course correction. But the core product remains the same AI companion concept that sparked mockery and protests. Charging $249 for a hardware device that essentially performs functions your phone already handles — just with a different form factor and a more intimate delivery mechanism — still feels like a tough sell, especially when the first act was defined more by marketing stunts than user love.