Today, Huawei held its Mate 20 event in China where
the company announced a new product aimed at the Chinese market. The product is
Huawei’s AI Speaker (translation from Chinese) which looks strikingly similar
to an Apple product: the HomePod: a highly-priced Siri-powered speaker that
launched with limited functionality.
Huawei did announce another smart speaker during
IFA. The AI Cube is a taller Google Home look-alike, but this is a product
aimed at the European market and is powered by Amazon Alexa. The AI Speaker is
powered by a Chinese voice assistant called Xiaoyi.
The speaker has Huawei branding right on top with
four physical buttons: mute, +, -, and a call button. The latter was the best
way to stick it to Apple for not launching the HomePod with simple phone call
support. It took 9 months after the HomePod’s release before Apple added
support for conversations.
The AI Speaker uses Huawei’s “Histen” tuning for
adapting the audio sound to the environment it is in. Danish brand Dynaudio
collaborated with Huawei to engineer the audio and acoustics. The 10W speaker
uses 2.25-inch hi-fi hardware and has six mics for voice recognition. Like
Google Home, it can tell different household members apart by voiceprint.
Its certainly nowhere near the US$ 349
retail price of the HomePod in the US. The new Huawei speaker is priced at just
399 CNY , which converts to about US$ 58. We don’t think this product will ever
leave out of Asian markets, much less ever make it to the States.
