Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker, is getting into “smart” speakers. The company just unveiled the Lenovo Smart Assistant, a tall, tubular speaker that has Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa built in. Lenovo says it worked directly with Amazon to integrate Amazon’s Alexa Voice Services, which are expected to show up in a wide variety of products at this year’s CES.
At first glance the Lenovo Smart Assistant looks, well, like Amazon’s own Echo speaker (unlike the Google Home, for example, which looks more like an air freshener). And the Smart Assistant will work pretty much the same way as the Echo: you’ll be able to use your voice to ask Alexa for the news, play music, set timers, and so on. But there are a few notable differences between Amazon’s own speaker and Lenovo’s variant.
For one, the color schemes are different, with Lenovo offering the Smart Assistant in light green, gray, or orange fabric. The microphone portion of the speaker is designer differently, too, jutting out from the top of it rather than lying flat like the Echo; Lenovo says this is for ventilation, to cool down the Intel Atom processor inside. Also, this is minor, but Lenovo’s Smart Assistant has eight far-field microphones, compared with the Echo’s seven.
But! Lenovo is also offering a Harman Kardon edition of its Smart Assistant speaker, addressing one of the biggest knocks on the Echo speaker and the Google Home: while they’re nifty voice-control devices, they’re not actually great … speakers. The Harmon Kardon edition is more expensive, but for people looking for a more premium sound, that might be the way to go.