Xiaomi’s subsidiary Yeelight, which is known for
making smart home products, has today officially launched a new product —
Yeelight Voice Assistant. As the name itself suggests, it is a smart speaker
powered by voice assistant — a first such product from the company.
In terms of looks, the Yeelight Voice Assistant is
very much similar to the Amazon Eco Dot which was launched in March last year.
The Yeelight’s smart speaker comes with four buttons on the top side — an action
button, microphone on/off button, volume up button and volume down button, just
like the Eco Dot.
However, the company has also included an additional
button in the centre, which can be used to put the speaker in mute mode. Such
feature is not available on Amazon’s Eco Dot but is present on the larger
versions of the Amazon Echo.
The speaker is believed to have been powered by
Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant. Since Xiaomi entered into a partnership
with Microsoft last year, all the Mi Smartphones comes pre-installed with
Microsoft’s apps. The Mi MIX was the first phone from Xiaomi to feature
Cortana.
It comes with six microphones and a single 2-Watt
speaker. The company says that the device comes equipped with an advanced voice
wake-up algorithm which can turn the device ON within a range of 5 meters. It
also comes with advanced Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and Beamforming
technology for echo reduction.
It is powered by a 64-bit Cortex A53 quad-core
processor clocked at 1.2 GHz and is coupled with 256MB RAM and 256MB of flash
storage. As of the connectivity options, the device supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz
Dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE).
As revealed by the company, the Yeelight Voice
Assistant comes with Dual AI systems and can also be used for controlling other
smart home products from Xiaomi, such as smart LED bulbs, table lamps, bedside
lights, ceiling lights, etc. While it currently supports only Xiaomi smart home
products, the company has said that support for more devices will be included
in the coming days.
Currently, the Yeelight Voice Assistant smart
speaker has been listed on the company’s crowdsourcing platform for a price of
199 Yuan, which roughly converts to US$ 30. The company is expected to start
shipping the device from 31st January in China.
