Lenovo, Dish Lead Pre-CES Announcements for Alexa Voice Control Integration

Lenovo said in a Tuesday blog post it teamed with Amazon to design the Lenovo Smart Assistant, an Alexa-like device at a lower price point than the Echo. The Lenovo Smart Assistant recognizes users’ voice commands and uses Alexa to do web searches, play music, create lists, provide calendar updates and more, it said. Lenovo cited Alexa’s dynamic growth capability: “Because Alexa’s brains are in the cloud, it means she’s always getting smarter.”

The Smart Assistant -- due in May at $129 in gray, light green and orange -- has eight 360-degree far-field mics with noise suppression and acoustic echo cancellation. The device is designed to pick up commands from up to 16 feet away, said Lenovo. A Harman Kardon-branded edition ($179) adds “premium audio quality” for music, said Lenovo. The Smart Assistant will run smart home devices from Lenovo and “scores” of products from third-party companies, it said.

Lenovo also will bring out in May a secure digital storage solution for photos, music and documents called Lenovo Smart Storage, with a 6 TB storage capacity, dual-band wireless access and multi-device auto-sync capabilities, said the company. The storage device has facial recognition software that can organize a user’s photo library based on faces “with high accuracy," it said.

The company sees voice control as essential to the advancement of the IoT, which it pegged at “the cusp of exponential growth.” In two years, IoT manufacturers are expected to ship nearly 2 billion devices, generating $490 billion in revenue, it said. But mainstream adoption is lagging as consumers have been “slow to embrace smart home technologies,” Lenovo said, citing a high cost barrier to owning IoT devices and “consumer confusion about which IoT device best serves their needs.” It referred to a recent Accenture survey indicating 23 percent of global consumers expressed uncertainty about which smart home devices would be useful to them.

In a runup to CES, Dish announced Tuesday among other moves (see 1701030012) that its subscribers later this year will be able to watch and manage TV shows hands-free, using Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant for voice control through an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot speaker. Voice control on broadband-connected Hopper DVRs will enable users to navigate, search and “quick play” TV content based on channel, title, actor and genre, said a Dish news release. It gave commands as examples: “Go to ESPN”; “Show me football games”; “Change the channel to NBC”; and “Find Matt Damon movies.” Voice control will be available in first half 2017 at no additional cost to subscribers, Dish said.

IDevices (Booth #41624) introduced in a pre-CES Tuesday announcement Instant Switch, a wireless, Bluetooth Smart-enabled wall switch that allows users to designate additional points of power control in the home without the need for rewiring. The Alexa-enabled switch pairs to iDevices power and lighting products and is designed to mimic a permanently installed light switch. Users can add an Instant Switch wherever they have wanted to have a standard wall switch: one by the bed can control lights on the first floor or one can be added to a room with no switches at all, said the company. The $49 device is due mid-year.

Startups are hopping on the Alexa train at CES, according to pre-show news. Artificial intelligence startup Vobot (#42373) announced the Vobot Clock that integrates with Alexa Voice Services. The Vobot Clock ($35, February) has a “sleep coach” that the company said will help users fall asleep faster and wake up earlier. Users can wake up to music via the clock’s 5-watt speaker, which can play white noise, “hypnotic music, natural sounds” and user’s content, said the company. Vobot has no buttons; users trigger functions through touching the surface to activate a voice conversation, covering the device to stop the alarm or flipping the device to engage the snooze function, it said. Vobot owners will be able to control smart home devices such as Philips Hue bulbs, request an Uber car, order pizza, get Facebook updates and stream music via voice, said the company. The clock will respond as “instantly” to voice commands as an Echo, the company said.

Elemental Path (#51303) will introduce at CES CogniToys, Alexa-enabled devices designed for kids. The device is targeted to kids ages 3-10 and answers children’s questions, plays games and tells stories. It has LED smart lights said to provide a visual and tactile experience along with verbal learning artificial intelligence.

Parks Associates lists voice control as the top trend for consumer technology in 2017, as it vies to become the primary user interface for the smart home and connected lifestyle. Some 40 percent of smartphone owners use voice recognition software, and that percentage bumps to 46 percent for millennials, said Parks.

“The introduction of voice controls through solutions such as Amazon Alexa-enabled products has opened new possibilities in how consumers can interact with smart home products and services,” said Parks analyst Tom Kerber. “We’ve seen a rush among major players to integrate with Amazon and other similar solutions that will create new avenues to engage consumers with the smart home.”

The Amazon Echo has “shaken up” the connected entertainment and smart home industries, and Amazon is “aggressively building a large number of partners” for the Echo ecosystem, said Parks. It also cited Google Home and an expected, but as yet unannounced, competitor from Apple based on Siri. “Voice control has emerged as a highly desirable interface, and developers in the smart home, entertainment and connected car ecosystems are pursuing partnerships to add voice control to their solutions,” said the research firm.

Voice recognition technologies are improving in accuracy and eventually will be able to interpret voice inflection and emotion, said Parks, citing IBM’s Watson technology, which can understand natural language questions and search for information. Google Now and Apple Siri can also use natural language to process information on mobile devices, it noted. “Natural language processing is becoming widely available.”

Alarm.com and Vivint announced Alexa integration in the connected security space, and production home builders have begun offering smart home systems, with some expected to include voice control, said Parks. Additional players to watch in voice control for 2017: August, LG, Microsoft and Nuance, Parks said.