“First there was Amazon’s Echo, which I characterized as an attempt to advance home automation through Amazon’s Alexa AI. Then there was Google Home, first unveiled last year at Google IO,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Now comes Microsoft’s Invoke, powered by Cortana and built by Samsung.”
“On the hardware side, there isn’t much that the companies can do to create product differentiation. Microsoft tries by enlisting the help of Harmon Kardon, owned by Samsung, to create a miniature speaker with better sound. Harmon Kardon’s involvement may have helped, but this isn’t about sound quality,” Hibben writes. “This is a battle between AIs, whose artificial thoughts bounce around literally thousands of servers somewhere in the Cloud. The smart speakers themselves are just a way to get the AI into your home so that you’ll keep using it even after you put down your smartphone, tablet, or AI-powered laptop.”
“Microsoft’s need for a smart speaker is especially acute, since it doesn’t have a smartphone platform of significance. That may explain Invoke’s… ability to make and receive Skype calls,” Hibben writes. “And Apple appears to be interested in this genre-bending device as well.”
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