Smart homes and smart home gadgets are
taking over homes in the western world. Google and Amazon seem to be pioneering
this aspect with their gadgets, the Google Home and Amazon Echo. And you know
what, China has got its own Dingdong A1 smart home speaker which is said to
square up to Amazon Echo and Google Home.
The Dingding A1 is the brainchild of
a Joint Venture (J.V) partnership between e-commerce guru Jingdong popularly
called JD.com and iFlytek, a Chinese voice technology company. The partnership
gave birth to Linglong Co which developed the Smart speaker.
The Dingdong A1 is a smart home speaker which comes
with a conical shape and the ability to respond to questions , manage
schedules, play music and connects with other household smart devices via WiFi.
The Dingdong A1 does all that the Amazon Echo and Google Home are capable of
but one edge it has over the duo is that it speaksChinese as well as English.
Chinese users can even use the Smart speaker to learn how to speak English.
Dingdong A1 has a very cute voice command to wake it
up. Just like the fictional Alibaba had the “open Sesame” phrase, the Dingdong
A1 has “Dingdong, Dingdong” as its own command. The speaker comes with a
ridiculously cheap price tag of 798 Yuan (US$ 116) but even at that, it is not
known yet if it would perform well in the market and if in the long run it is
anywhere close to Google Home and Amazon’s Echo.
