A smart speaker with a detachable display lets you own a tablet + smart speaker!

Nearly one in every four homes in the United States of America has a smart speaker in it. That’s a real statistic, not a guess. I’d say roughly the same amount also own a tablet, like an iPad or a Surface. So why not mash the two products together? Weilin D’s AI Assistant is a combination of a tablet and a smart speaker… and its framework is pretty familiar. In fact, it looks a lot like an Amazon Echo Show, or a Google Home Hub, but with a couple of key differences.

Weilin’s AI Assistant comes as a smart-speaker with a display, but here’s where things get interesting. The display is completely detachable. Designed to be used as a tablet you’d have around the house, the AI Assistant’s detachable display is great for watching content, viewing recipes, checking the time, or having as an ambient, ever-changing photo frame. The display detaches off the dock, which is the smart-speaker. Built with a wireless charger, the dock can juice up the tablet’s battery when idle, and has a far-field microphone that allows you to use the AI Assistant as a smart speaker to command it to play music, answer or reject calls, set reminders, control smart-home products, or order stuff online. Housed within the dock is also a sliding camera that conveniently stays blocked by the tablet. When you’re in the mood for a video conference, the camera slides up and allows you to do video-chats with other people, quite like Facebook’s Portal device, but with a stronger focus on privacy. Once you’re done, the camera slides back into its enclosure.

Designer: Weilin D

Isn’t it time the set-top box did much more?

Quite simply and aptly titled the Smart Set Top Box, Weilin D and Xican Deng’s conceptual tv box does much more than broadcast televised content to a display. Just as the title of the article suggests, the Smart Set Top Box is capable of much more. With in-built stereo speaker, the set top box complements its crisp visuals with ‘banging’ audio to match, and when not connected to the television, the set top box works as a smart speaker too… However, its feature list doesn’t quite end there. Housed in the top of the box is a retractible webcam that also allows you to make video calls using your television as a display, because Facetime/Skype on a 4K television is quite the experience to have!

Designers: Weilin D & Xican Deng