Xiaomi today announced its first smart home speaker powered by Microsoft’s Digital Assistant Cortana. Priced under $30, the speaker is from Yeelight, Xiaomi’s subsidiary company and it looks very similar to Amazon’s Echo Dot, Alexa powered smart home speaker.
Xiaomi’s new product ‘Yeelight Voice Assistant’ competes directly with Amazon, Harman Kardon and Google home speakers. The Yeelight Voice Assistant comes in cylindrical form, and it resembles the look of Amazon Echo Dot.
The Yeelight Voice Assistant is powered by a 64-bit version of quad-core Cortex A53 chipset with a clock speed of 1.2 GHz, paired with 256GB of RAM. The control buttons are on the top.
The device supports advanced wake-up algorithm which can listen from a 5-meter range, it also comes with a set of six microphones. Xiaomi is using Acoustic Echo Cancellation and Beamforming technology to reduce the ‘echo’. It also supports 4GHz/5GHz Dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE.
Xiaomi will sell the white variant of the speaker and it is priced at 199 Yuan (approximately $30), the speaker will ship from January 31 in China.
For $30, Xiaomi’s new speaker is a good deal. It’s worth noting that Cortana has approximately 230 skills, it pales in comparison to the Amazon Alexa which has over 25,000 skills.
