Today, Microsoft and Harman Kardon finally announced the availability of the Invoke, the first Cortana-powered smart speaker. Indeed, it's been over ten months since Microsoft first teased the product, and it's finally here.
And naturally, we've got one, and the first thing we're doing is taking the wraps off of it.
You should be able to use any Cortana device to activate it; Microsoft says that it works with Android, iOS, and Windows. I used a Samsung Galaxy Note8 for this purpose, and the process was pretty straightforward.
After setup, things got a little clunky though. You should be able to tap the top and Cortana will give you an interesting fact or tell a joke, but that wasn't working. Oddly enough, that worked fine after I had been using it for a while, and it stopped trying to tell me things that I can do with Cortana.
Another thing that I found interesting is that it only supports Spotify, iHeart Radio, and TuneIn for music, so there's no Groove, as the service is to be killed off at the end of the year. Still, you can't even play the music in your OneDrive.
Check out our unboxing and first impressions video below:
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