Always listening and always judging, this is the new AI necklace called ‘Friend’
Published on Sep 11, 2025 at 7:57 AM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Sep 10, 2025 at 5:09 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Emma Matthews
This AI necklace is called Friend, and it’s like a companion that’s always listening.
If it sounds a little strange, well, it is.
Interestingly, this AI necklace was developed specifically to keep you company and nothing else.
And wait until you hear what the company did to promote this AI wearable.
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This AI necklace must be good at gossip
Friend is an AI necklace that’s basically designed to keep you company.
It is always listening, and apparently providing some sort of running commentary.
Hopefully, they programmed it to be overwhelmingly positive (spoiler alert: no, they didn’t), because the last thing you want is this necklace to badmouth your friend in their presence.
Jokes aside, the tech behind it is interesting.
The Friend necklace has an always-on microphone that’s always listening to your environment and conversations.
It then processes said conversations and generates messages sent to your phone.
Something else that’s surprising is that the Friend’s CEO apparently spent $1.8 million to buy the domain Friend.com to promote the product.
And speaking of money, it costs $129.
A new generation of AI products
With exceptions, such as Flowtica’s AI pen, artificial intelligence has so far been mostly used for images, videos, and chatbots.
Obviously, AI is also incorporated in smartphones and cars, but those are products that already existed before AI.
By contrast, when it comes to tech gizmos created specifically for – and with – AI, the market is still relatively barren.
Maybe that’s because the track record of AI-first products isn’t great.
Robots, for example, tend to misbehave quite a lot, and they are becoming scarily ‘human’.
A while back, a robot collapsed after a ‘hard’ day at work.
As for AI wearables, these projects often fail.
The Humane AI pin is a classic case in point.
The company spent well over $200 million on a product that was very poorly received by the market before closing up shop.
