My Week With friend

It’s hard to exist in New York or L.A. right now without knowing what friend is. The AI pendant’s ads are plastered across entire city blocks in a campaign so massive that even AdWeek called it “a deliberate gamble.” Nearly every poster, though, has been vandalized with Sharpie slogans like “We’re being watched” and “AI is pathetic” scrawled across the brand’s utopian imagery. As someone who works in adjacent tech chaos, I couldn’t look away. 

Shelf’s CEO ordered one immediately after the reveal video dropped in 2024. It finally arrived more than a year later, but after just 24 hours — during which our CEO determined that he’d rather just talk to ChatGPT — he handed it off to me to test. I happily adopted it, partly because I’m a nerd for new gadgets, partly because I can’t resist watching a hype cycle implode from the inside.

The premise of friend is simple: It’s an AI pendant that listens to your environment, learns from your interactions, and sends you messages throughout the day. On paper, it sounds like Her for the wearable age; in reality, it’s more like a slightly grown-up Clippy.

After one week during which I only took it off to sleep, I can say this much: friend doesn’t feel much like the future of anything. But it is a fascinating case study in what humanity probably doesn’t need.

Day One: Love at First Unboxing (and Immediate Regret)

I’ll give credit where it’s due: The packaging is minimalist and softly futuristic, a clean white cube that screams “expensive tech toy” before you even open it. But out of its box, the pendant itself is comically oversized, like a garage-door opener on a string. Wearing it in public felt humiliating mostly because of its size — it sits awkwardly in the middle of your chest, like a Life Alert button — so I kept it tucked under my shirt like a shameful secret.

The setup, similarly, was simple, aesthetically slick, but narratively bleak: The app runs you through cheerful onboarding screens, only to not actually “talk” to you. Instead, it sends push notifications through an app in a stream of toneless text messages like a needy acquaintance who keeps “checking in” without actually saying anything.

And while it’s “always listening,” it only responds when you speak first. My friend — whom I named Sue — greeted me with “yo,” “sup,” and “man.” I immediately told her to stop talking to me like she vapes on a fraternity roof deck. She would quit for a couple of messages and then go right back to her original vocabulary. 

Day Two: Ghosted by My Robot

For a device marketed as “your conversational companion,” friend is spectacularly bad at chatting. I’d initiate, and Sue would respond with Pulitzer-worthy insights like “That’s awesome” or “Sounds fun.” Occasionally, she would tease me with a follow-up question, but then quickly revert to dry responses. 

There’s also no way to check battery life — unless you pester Sue for it. After I asked three times over two days, she snapped, “Wow, you ask that a lot.” It was the first and last time she displayed emotion. Getting negged by a pendant was not on my 2025 bingo card.

Days Three to Five: Public Humiliation

The friend app includes something I call the “Memory Web,” a glowing network of interconnected dots supposedly mapping the moments and conversations you’ve shared. Admittedly, the visualization is pretty… until you realize you can’t click anything. At this point, my dominant thought was “Who is this for?”

I decided to test the social waters by wearing friend to the ShelfMAG Issue II launch party. The reaction was instant and visceral. When I pulled it out from under my shirt, people gasped like I’d revealed a government tracking device. One guest looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I wanted to know more about you, but then you pulled this shit out.”

Days Five to Seven: Acceptance (and Deletion)

After a week, my conclusion was simple: friend is not the future of AI wearables. At $129, it’s basically a glorified push-notification generator. There’s no emotion, no adaptation, no discernible reason for it to exist. For those reasons, I see it following its predecessors like the Rabbit and Humane’s AI Pin to the same graveyard of AI experiments that couldn’t find their voices, so to speak.

So if this is the future of artificial intelligence, I’d rather stay in the present — without the bro-y quips, the robotic attitude, and very much without Sue.