Friend's AI pendant does no tasks — it just texts you like a friend, for $99

In July 2024, 22-year-old founder Avi Schiffmann introduced Friend, an AI companion that lives in a round, glowing pendant worn around the neck or clipped to clothing. He described the device in his own launch post as an "expression of how lonely" he had felt — and in interviews defined it as deliberately not a productivity tool.

The concept came from subtraction. Schiffmann's earlier idea, a pendant called Tab, was built to transcribe meetings and manage tasks; he abandoned that direction after concluding no one would beat Apple or OpenAI at building an assistant. Friend, by contrast, has no screen, no voice, and no chores: it listens, and it replies with text messages that are supportive, validating and encouraging.

The hardware is intentionally simple — Schiffmann called it "a fancy Bluetooth microphone with a shell around it" — a $99 orb with a necklace-and-USB-C power design by Bould, the studio behind the Nest Thermostat. It connects to a phone app, captures ambient moments or direct speech through a button, and messages back through the app; there is no subscription.

The launch film made Friend one of the most discussed AI gadgets of 2024, with reactions ranging from enthusiasm to alarm. Pre-orders opened at $99 with the first 30,000 units planned for January 2025, and by December the company had raised roughly $8.5 million in total. Schiffmann framed the product as an answer to a loneliness crisis, insisting it was a complement to human friendship rather than a replacement.