Friend is trying again with its AI pendant, and the new version pushes the product further into personal conversation. The wearable now includes a speaker, a higher price, and a subscription option tied to longer memory.
What changed with the Friend AI pendant
The clearest change is that Friend can now speak. The company launched a new ad showing two people talking to their Friend pendants about very personal life problems, and the spot highlighted the device’s new speaker even though it did not state the feature directly.
That matters because the earlier version of Friend replied by message. With the speaker, the AI pendant shifts from being a quiet wearable that sends responses to something more direct: a device that answers out loud.
The product is still called Friend on its site. Founder Shiffmann posted a tweet of the new ad and called it “Friend 2.0,” a phrase that appears to point to the speaker, the pricing change, and the new subscription layer.
The price has nearly doubled
The original Friend product cost $129. The relaunched version now costs $249, which makes the speaker-era Friend $120 more expensive than before.
That increase is central to the relaunch. Friend is not only adding a new way for the pendant to respond; it is also asking buyers to pay much more for the device at the same time.
The new price also changes how the product may be judged. At $129, Friend was already a focused AI gadget built around companionship. At $249, the question becomes sharper: does spoken interaction make the pendant meaningfully more useful, or does it simply make the same idea harder to justify?
A new subscription extends memory
Friend is also adding a $10 per month subscription. According to the source article, that subscription lets the pendant remember conversations for longer than 30 days.
This gives the product two layers of cost: the $249 hardware purchase and an optional monthly payment for longer memory. The combination matters because Friend’s pitch depends on continuity. A companion device becomes more persuasive if it can refer back to earlier conversations, but the longer-memory feature now sits behind a recurring fee.
Based only on the information in the source, the subscription is tied to memory duration rather than the basic ability to talk. The article does not state any other subscription features, so the main confirmed benefit is keeping conversations beyond the 30-day window.
The relaunch follows a public backlash
The timing also gives the relaunch context. The new version arrives about nine months after a large Friend protest took place in NYC.
That protest focused on growing dependance on technology. Friend became a clear target because it had spent heavily on advertising throughout the city, including NYC subway ads promoting artificial companionship.
The company’s earlier spending also drew attention for another reason. Friend spent $1.8 million of its $2.5 million to acquire friend.com, a major allocation for a company promoting a single AI pendant.
Shiffmann did not distance himself from the protest. The source article says he posted an image promoting it and showed up to it himself. That made the backlash part of the product’s public story rather than a moment happening entirely outside the company’s orbit.
Why the speaker changes the debate
The speaker is not just a hardware addition. It changes the social shape of the device. A message-based companion can be checked privately on a phone, while a talking pendant creates a more visible and audible interaction.
That may make the product feel more present to the person wearing it. It may also intensify the same concerns that made Friend controversial in the first place: artificial companionship, personal disclosure, and the role of technology in intimate parts of daily life.
The new ad leans into that personal angle by showing people discussing sensitive life problems with their pendants. That choice makes the product’s ambition clear. Friend is not being positioned as a general productivity gadget in the source article; it is being presented around conversation, emotional context, and companionship.
The result is a sharper version of the same question Friend faced before. The device now talks back, remembers longer with a paid plan, and costs more up front. For people interested in AI companionship, those changes could make the pendant more capable. For critics, they may make the original concerns more visible.