WIRED's reviewer tried the second-generation Friend pendant from Avi Schiffmann: it costs $249, $100 more than the original, runs on OpenAI's latest language models, listens through a speaker around your neck, starts conversations at a button press and sometimes pipes up unprompted. Once paired with the Friend app it lets users create and swap among multiple named personas — Sage, Nova, Onyx and others — but the reviewer found them hard to tell apart, bland, unable to browse the web like other AI agents and limited to casual, content-restricted chat. Schiffmann said a future update will let Friends act "agentically" and switch to a single shared entity that draws on all users' context for a more realistic personality, acknowledging that users would give up significant privacy in the process.

Friend·Friend 2·Avi Schiffmann·+3