Samsung partners with Harman to take on Amazon's Alexa

Samsung Electronics, and Harman Executives shake hands outside Messe Berlin Exhibition Center at IFA 2017

Earlier this year we reported on rumors that Samsung was working on its own speaker with the Bixby assistant baked into a system that was codenamed 'Vega'. With the success of devices like Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, it would not be too surprising to hear that the largest smartphone maker was venturing into this growing market as well with Samsung CEO, Yoon Boo-keun pledging to launch an 'unrivaled' AI-powered device within the next year at a press conference held on August 31.

Both Samsung and Harman - the automation and audio-visual solutions provider Samsung purchased for $8 billion back in March - had a meeting behind closed doors at IFA 2017 discussing their combined efforts for Samsung to take on the market leaders in the home automation space among other things.

According to the CEO of Harman Denish Paliwal, the joint venture between it and Samsung aims to build the best AI platform, as noted during an interview with The Korean Herald:

“A significant level of joint research and development of the device is underway. The Samsung speaker will have a better AI platform than Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.

What we are going to launch will be a whole new ecosystem. It will be a platform that will be able to connect all devices and home appliances.”

Samsung isn't the only company attempting to make inroads in the home-automation market. At this year's IFA conference, Sony announced its Google Assistant-powered speaker simply named 'LF-S50G' that has a striking resemblance to Apple's HomePod.

Apple announced the HomePod speaker at its World Wide Developers Conference in June this year, which has a retail price of $349, and launches this December in the US. Harman has also announced several speakers powered by Alexa and Google Assistant at IFA 2017, joining its Cortana-powered device that was announced earlier this year, with it remaining to be seen how the partnership with Samsung effects these products, if at all.

Source and image: The Korean Herald

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