After the global unveil of Huawei Mate 20, the Chinese giant today held the same launch in its home country where it introduced a couple of other devices including a wireless phone charger, a car charger, a smartwatch, and a new AI speaker.
The new Huawei AI Speaker looks similar to the Apple’s HomePod Smart speaker and packs in a color profile similar to that of Amazon’s Echo Dot. Unlike the previously announced Alexa powered Huawei AI Cube which came with an in-built 4G router, this new China-specific speaker relies on a Chinese voice assistant called as Xiaoyi.
As far as the design is concerned, it bears a cylindrical form factor with Huawei branding at the top followed by four control buttons including mute, +, -, and a call button. There are a total of 6 microphones to interact with the Assistant.
Furthermore, the speakers come with built-in 2.25-inch high-fidelity hardware, with a 10W speaker and two passive bass radiators. This when coupled with Huawei’s Histen algorithms (featuring custom music equalizer and booster) results in a more natural sounding effect and more powerful bass performance, adapting the environment it is kept in. The company has further partnered with Danish hi-fi brand Dynaudio to engineer the audio and acoustics of the speaker.
The reason why it contains “AI” in its name is due to the fact that it can differentiate between the family members based on their Voice-print, building up for a dynamic interaction, similar to the Google Home.
Lastly, coming to the price, Huawei has pitted these new AI speakers for just 399 CNY (roughly Rs. 4,200) in China, making them one of the best options for that price tag. Anyways, it is hard that we’ll see these speakers in the markets outside China while it might be available for import, but again, the Chinese assistant makes it nearly impossible for others to cope with.
