The New Friend AI Pendant Can Now Talk Back to You

Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann welcomes me into his palace—what he calls his large apartment in San Francisco.He sits on the couch in his living room, clad in an orange shirt emblazoned with a cartoon version of the motorcycle driven by Italian racer Valentino Rossi. He props his feet up on the side table and leans back, a round, softly glowing circular Friend pendant dangling from a yellow cord around his neck.This is the second iteration of the Friend necklace, the controversial AI companion device that just about everyone (me included) seems to hate. The company announced the device on Thursday through its new X handle.The first version of Friend was an always-listening AI wearable that responded via text message. The big update here is a speaker on the back that lets the device voice its responses aloud. That has changed the shape of the pendant, as the underside with the speaker is bulkier than before. Its AI chops have also been upgraded, now running OpenAI’s latest models.Courtesy of FriendLike the first go, Friend aims to be a digital companion users can talk to and hold long conversations with. Unlike the original, each new pendant comes with a random voice and personality already established. The user cannot change the voice or name, so you’re locked in with that Friend. (Your mileage may vary on how friendly the thing actually is to you.)The new pendant costs $249, a marked increase over the original’s $129 price. You can buy one now on Friend.com, a domain Schiffmann paid $1.8 million for. There is also an optional $10 monthly subscription that lets the AI remember the conversations you’ve had for longer than 30 days. The colorful cord around Schiffmann’s neck is part of an accessories collection he says will be coming later this year.Schiffmann first garnered headlines in 2020 as a 17-year-old who built a website to track Covid-19 cases during the pandemic. Now 24, he’s far more well known—and outright notorious—for leading a company that makes a device many have called dystopian or like something out of a Black Mirror episode.“I’ve grown up a lot,” Schiffmann tells me just about every time I see him.Behind Schiffmann’s couch is a gigantic framed photograph of a Paris subway station with ads for the Friend pendant splayed across the walls. The ads, placed by Schiffmann’s company across New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago in 2025—and Paris in early 2026—sparked vigorous pushback and controversy over AI usage. People graffitied them in protest and griped that they devalued humanity, generating a litany of poignant headlines about the ads. The marketing got much more attention than the actual product ever did. (The art frame he’s got the photo in at home cost $500, Schiffmann tells me later. Update: Schiffmann clarified that it was actually $5,000.)“Something like Friend is very dystopian in people’s minds and very futuristic,” Schiffmann says. “But we’re presenting it in the most analog way possible.”Courtesy of FriendThat analog component is important to Schiffmann. He says he doesn’t have an internet connection in his home. He listens to music on a record player. He’s shooting a documentary about himself on Kodak Ektachrome. (The film started as a documentary-style version of The Social Network, he says, “but now it’s turning much more into like a Boyhood-style thing.” ) He argues that the controversial ad campaign was also analog, using print media to encourage human interaction.After the ad campaign peaked, Schiffmann released a series of four user videos highlighting Friend customers. The videos are profoundly weird, often borderline bleak looks at people who suffer from depression or sheer loneliness. He says the move was deliberate to show the real people using his devices.“That’s life, isn’t it?” Schiffmann says. “I'm so much more intrigued to see how it’s affecting the people in those random Appalachian towns or whatever than it is [creating] slight productivity gains for finance people in New York. I don’t really give a fuck.”Schiffmann says all of the consternation around Friend—and the resulting media sensations—has been deliberate. He seems to like making people mad, or at least feel something, leading some to ask whether this is all just an elaborate Warhol-esque art display. I ask Schiffmann if this has all just been an elaborate bit, more than an actual product endeavor.“Reality is so over; everything is ironic now,” Schiffmann says. “Nothing is sacred anymore, and so Friend is both real but also, like, ridiculous. Friend, he acknowledges while wandering around a house where nearly all the art on the walls consists of large paintings he has made himself, is an inherently egomaniacal ambition.Courtesy of Friend“The whole thing is supposed to be me, in a way, and how I feel,” Schiffmann says. “And it’s encapsulated into a product.”Still, Friend is very much a product Schiffmann is trying to sell. He says he sold his first run of 5,000 pendants. Now he wants to grow, and aims to sell 50,000 of the second version. (You probably won’t be able to buy one in the European Union, as Schiffmann says he will likely pull the product from the EU because meeting the data privacy rules set by the General Data Protection Regulation makes it too expensive to sell there.)To hit that goal, Schiffmann’s going to have to convince lots more people to bring this often snarky, funhouse-mirror-style reflection of his character into their lives. He says he understands that people have the impression that Friend users are odd, but he hopes that will change and the product will become more appealing to “normal people.”In the meantime, his media campaign for the product again focuses on people using the device by themselves or occasionally with another person—asking it whether they’ll ever get married or if their creative works are any good. The videos are vivid, with retro-looking color grading, but there’s always some quiet desperation that the Friend pendant seems to promise more than it can solve.Schiffmann has a sort of obsession with filmmaking, though he does say that the industry is “played out.” Still, he is involved in all the shoots for his company’s videos. This seems to be his real passion, and the controversy-stirring uncanny AI pals might just be a means to that end.“How do you make lonely weirdos look cool?” Schiffmann says. “I think it's kind of interesting.”Correction on July 30 at 12:02 pm ET: Schiffmann says the art frame for his Friend poster is actually $5,000, not $500. We've clarified this in the story.