Samsung working on a Bixby-powered smart speaker

Another virtual assistant will reportedly gain physical form – the Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is building a Bixby-powered smart speaker. The project faces delays as its core technology isn’t even done yet.

We’re talking, of course, about Bixby itself – it’s only just going into Open Beta in the US. WSJ claims that we won’t see a full release until at least the latter half of July.

This has been slowing down the hardware project – code named Vega – the features and specifications of which haven’t been decided yet. You can bet it will support Samsung’s Smart Home and IoT-enabled Tvs.

While S Voice launched several years ago with relatively little competition, the Bixby speaker is getting into a crowded market – most recently Apple’s HomePod and Harman Kardon’s Cortana-powered speaker joined Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home.

PS. Samsung now owns Harman so it has the in-house team to build the new speaker (not to mention the Level Bluetooth speakers). And Qualcomm has a chip ready, in case the Exynos division doesn’t have anything suitable.

Source (paywall) | Via