Lenovo has launched a smart speaker powered by Amazon's Alexa personal assistant. Much like the Amazon Echo, the speaker uses artificial intelligence to answer your questions, play music, and sync to your smart home to control devices such as your thermostat and lights. The main difference? Sound quality.
Lenovo is offering a special Harman Kardon Edition of the Smart Assistant. The firm hasn't released details of the Harman Kardon's innards, only that it features an additional 2in sound cavity for a "clearer tweeter and deeper bass". But suffice to say it should sound better than the standard Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speaker.
The standard Lenovo Smart Assistant features a 5W tweeter and 10W woofer. It also has eight far-field microphones for picking up your voice commands from up to 5m away, compared to the Echo's seven.
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It's also more colourful than the Amazon Echo, coming in light grey, green and orange colour schemes. The Harman Kardon edition comes in black.
According to Johnson Jia, Lenovo's senior vice president, PC & Smart Device Business Group, the device is anything but a me-too product. "Our goal has never been to simply build smart home devices for the sake of advancing technology alone," he said.
The Lenovo Smart Assistant costs $130 (£106), or $180 (£147) for the Harman Kardon Edition, and will go on sale in May in North America and China. At the moment there are no plans to launch the devices in the UK, but we will let you know if that changes.
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