Friend Relaunches Its AI Companion Pendant at $249 With a Speaker That Talks Back
TechCrunch·low signal
Avi Schiffmann's Friend returned on July 30 as 'Friend 2.0' with a built-in speaker projecting a consistent personality, up from the original's text-only messaging and priced at $249 versus $99 at launch two years ago. This is the company that spent $1.8M of its $2.5M raise on the friend.com domain and blanketed the NYC subway with ads. The 2.5x price increase for adding a speaker is the clearest test yet of whether AI-companion hardware has any pricing power or just novelty.