Now that the market is flooded with AI-powered voice assistants, developed by major technology giants (and even some new ones), each of them are also planning to release an intelligent home speaker to make their way into your homes — be it placed on the living room table or the kitchen counter top.
According to fresh reports, Samsung is also planning to follow in the same footsteps to release its voice activated smart speaker in the coming weeks. The Korean giant recently released its flagship Galaxy S8 lineup, which were the very first devices to include the smarts of Bixby. The same assistant, the Korea Herald suggests, is expected to make its way to a physical speaker — but you should not expect to receive it anytime soon.
You ask why? It is because Samsung has not made Bixby’s voice features available to Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus users in the U.S at the moment. The Korean giant is delaying the roll out of the voice capabilities of the AI assistant due to difficulties with the English language. It has already launched the voice capabilities in its homeground — South Korea — about a month ago.
The company is, however expected to make the complete set of capabilities of Samsung’s voice assistant available to users through its Bixby-powered smart speaker. There is currently no info on the design aesthetic, feature set as well as the launch and pricing of the said speaker.
You can surely expect the Bixby speaker to be priced on the higher side, much like Apple’s Siri speaker, and include features which are comparable to its competitors. This means you will have the option to play the music you like, learn about the weather, ask any questions you may have directly by speaking out loud. The Korean giant could bring in some help from the audio equipment maker — Harman — it had recently acquired for $8 billion to build the Bixby-powered speaker.
And if you check out the current market scenario then you’d notice that it is not only Samsung who’s adopting this strategy. The smart speaker revolution, kicked off by Amazon Echo, has not even left the biggest technology giant on the face of Earth– Apple untouched. Cupertino unveiled its smart home speaker — HomePod — during the keynote address at WWDC’17 earlier this week.
It is powered by the smarts of Siri and can perform all your basic tasks but that’s not the focus of this device. Apple is adverting the same as the best sounding ‘smart’ speaker available on the market at the moment. Several have already confirmed that this claim is justified — it sounds better even than Sonos speakers.
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