Lenovo’s Smart Assistant is a $129 Alternative to the Amazon Echo

Adds Mashable: “Lenovo has a smart speaker whose potential customers are easy to define: Everyone who wants an Amazon Echo, but needs better sound”. Amazon Echo speakers have proved to be widely popular and among the company’s best-selling products, and the more recent Google Home is gaining steam as well. Lenovo’s version is also less expensive, at least for the standard edition-the Smart Assistant will run $130 MSRP and be available in light gray, green, and orange beginning in May. Taking on a similar sturdy pillar design as the Echo, the Smart Assistant has a white upper half, with a chrome-rimmed disc hovering above it, and a woven grille bringing some colour to the lower half.

The list of devices that incorporate Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa has grown. The device features eight 360-degree microphones with acoustic echo cancellation and noise suppression. Reinforcing that belief this morning is Lenovo who are out of the blocks early in Las Vegas with three new smart home devices in tow.

Lenovo has announced a new voice-activated speaker to rival the Amazon Echo and Google Home, but is receiving a huge helping hand from the former.

Chinese technology firm Lenovo has unveiled its own version of Amazon’s smart assistant, which acts as a central command centre for connected-home gadgets and systems.

With the smart home racing to mainstream adoption, Microsoft still wins if they power the back end, and leave the front end to some-one else.

Whirlpool is showcasing new washers, dryers, refrigerators, and ovens at CES this week, and their most interesting feature is the ability to be controlled by Amazon’s Alexa.

Lenovo says that the Smart Storage is “designed for security and P2P (peer-to-peer) access to stored media like photos, music and documents”. It will cost $179.99 and will also be available in May 2017.

Lenovo also revealed a new wireless NAS hard drive, coming in both 2TB and 6TB sizes, that’s created to help users organize their digital photo libraries via built-in facial-recognition software, similar to Google Photos or Apple’s Photos app.