Lenovo outs its own Alexa-powered home speaker

At Amazon, we work hard to provide customers with as much choice as possible-and Lenovo’s new Smart Assistant speaker does just that through leveraging the power of Alexa Voice Services (AVS).

Before CES 2017 fully kicks into gear, Lenovo has now unveiled its tubular speaker called Lenovo Smart Assistant, which comes with Amazon Alexa baked in. Alexa’s momentum in third-party devices reflects the company’s surprise early lead over competitors including Google, Microsoft and Apple in the market for voice-controlled devices. In addition to owning a Whirlpool appliance that supports the tech, users will need to have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device (Echo, Echo Dot, Fire TV, etc.) nearby to listen up for commands.

For a while, Amazon has had a leg up in the smart speaker industry with its successful Echo speaker. That must be the question that Lenovo’s engineers asked themselves when cooking up the “Lenovo Smart Assistant with Amazon Alexa”. The device has a lot in common with Amazon’s Echo, including support for Alexa, which offers numerous same features as it does on the Echo. Retaining Echo’s cylindrical design, the device is half aluminum casing, half colored speaker grill. Check out these mobile Bluetooth options.

In terms of other hardware variances over its inspiration, the Smart Assistant has eight far-field microphones around the top ring compared to the Echo’s seven.

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It’s also more colourful than the Amazon Echo, coming in light grey, green and orange colour schemes. Soon, you’ll be able to use Alexa to command your Hopper DVR, telling it to do things such as “Play the Warriors game” or “Find comedy movies”. “If that won’t do it for you in the sound department, there is also a special Harman Kardon edition that is all-black and has an additional 2” sound cavity. Its integrated facial recognition software can organize an entire photo library based on faces with high accuracy. To that end, the company is also launching a model of the Smart Assistant made with audio company Hardon Karmon.