xda: Motorola may launch a Google Home Mini/Amazon Echo Dot competitor

vendredi 17 août 2018

Motorola may launch a Google Home Mini/Amazon Echo Dot competitor

The virtual assistant devices have become quite popular for those who want more out of their connected devices. These virtual assistants, such as Siri and Google Assistant, originated on iOS and Android respectively. But Amazon created an entire hardware market for these virtual assistant services with the Amazon Echo. The Echo was quite a successful device for the company and it was one that spawned Google’s competition to create devices like these of their own. Google has the Google Home and Google Home Mini, Samsung has the Bixby Speaker, and even Apple has the HomePod. However, a new leak published today claims that Motorola wants in on this market as well and could end up releasing a competitor to the Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo Dot.

Some would say that the Motorola brand has been floundering since they were brought under the Lenovo umbrella. There’s no doubt that the entire company has gone through a restructuring strategy since that acquisition was made official. Lenovo themselves have already released one of these virtual assistant products that they ended up calling the Lenovo Smart Display. It looks more like a tablet embedded into an enclosure that makes it easy to place on your nightstand, kitchen table, etc.

Not everyone is a fan of these “smart display” products though, which makes sense that they have possibly had Motorola working on a regular smart speaker. The rumor comes to us from AndroidPure, yet details of the name of the device have yet to be revealed. It’s currently being referred to as the Motorola Smart AI assistant speaker and some leaked press images give us a look at what the company has possibly been working on. It’s also unclear what software will be running on the speaker.

Lenovo’s Smart Display had Alexa as its AI companion and Motorola ended up releasing a Moto Mod that also included Alexa as well. The leak did give us some information about the hardware inside the smart speaker, which includes an ARM 53 Cortex CPU, Bluetooth, WiFi connectivity, a weight of 280 grams, and a diameter of 90mm. The marketing material even talks about integration with other products from companies including LifeSmart, BroadLink, Tuya, Haier, Orvibo, and others.