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

Harman Kardon makes an Alexa killer!

So this happened. Just how Amazon suddenly debuted the Echo speaker with the Alexa AI assistant inside it and completely changed the smart-home game overnight (single-handedly cementing Alexa’s place in the AI Assistant battle between Google, Apple, and Windows)… this happened recently. Harman Kardon (a company recently acquired by Samsung) debuted its Invoke speaker, a large sound-pillar with Cortana, The Windows AI Assistant built in. We’re very eager to see how this will stand up to the Amazon Echo, simply since Harman Kardon have been absolute champions of audio for decades, and Cortana has been a lone-underdog with no one really using Windows phones.

On the design front, the Invoke is a lot like the Echo, with its matte metal vertical cylinder design crowned with the LED light ring on top. However, it completely destroys its opponent when it comes to audio, because no one really makes speakers quite like Harman Kardon! Unlike Echo’s single driver construction, the Invoke has 3 woofers and 3 tweeters, giving it a solid edge over the competition. We’re still really eager to see what the AI will be like and will it match up to Alexa (who’s known to be partial towards Amazon’s own products and services).

It also goes to show that Harman Kardon plays its cards well, choosing Cortana rather than its own parent company Samsung’s voice assistant Bixby. In all honesty, it has barely been weeks since Bixby’s launch, so we really can’t expect it to match up to Microsoft’s voice assistant that has been in development since 2009.

Designer: Harman Kardon

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