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Harman CEO: Samsung’s smart speaker will have a "better AI platform" than its rivals
We have been hearing rumors regarding a Bixby-powered speaker for quite some time now, and although we still don’t know much about it, we do know that it is coming. A couple of weeks ago, a Samsung executive confirmed that the company is indeed developing its own smart connected speaker that will have Bixby on board.
Thanks to a report by The Korea Herald, we now know just a little bit more about the upcoming device. Samsung is developing it in partnership with Harman International, the company it acquired back in March for $8 billion.
In a chat with The Korea Herald, Dinesh Paliwal, the CEO of Harman International, said that he had a meeting with Samsung’s president and CEO of the consumer electronics business during IFA in Berlin. The two executives talked about the upcoming Bixby-powered speaker, which will likely be announced sometime next year.
Samsung's upcoming speaker will have a better AI platform than its rivals such as the Google Home and Amazon's Alexa-powered devices.
According to Paliwas, a lot of the joint research and development of the upcoming device is already underway. He also mentioned that the speaker will have a “better AI platform” than its rivals including the Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices. He didn’t go into specifics regarding this, but did say the speaker will be “a platform that will be able to connect all devices and home appliances.” What this means is that it will allow you to control a lot of other smart devices you might have in your home.
So it looks like the company is quite confident regarding its Bixby-powered speaker and believes that it will offer a lot more than the competition. The company definitely has a lot of work ahead, as Amazon is currently dominating the market with the Echo and other devices, while Google comes in second with the Home device. Although things can change quite quickly, as more and more companies are entering the market with their own products.
These include Apple that will release the HomePod in December, and Sony, which just took the wraps off the Assistant-powered LF-S50G. To stand out from the crowd, Samsung’s speaker will really have to bring something unique to the table that will convince people to buy it instead of the Google Home or any of the other rival devices. We’ll have to wait until it is revealed to see exactly what that might be.