It is safe to say that the Amazon Echo was a bit of a surprise hit. This is because there are already several voice assistants in the market today, and the idea of baking it into a speaker seemed more novel than functional at that time, but judging from the response so far, Amazon seems to have struck gold with it.
So much so that companies like Google have launched competing products, and others such as Apple are rumored to follow suit. However there’s a good chance that Microsoft could be beating Apple to the punch because in a recent teaser video, it seems that come 2017 Harman Kardon will be launching what appears to be a set of speakers that comes with Cortana baked into it.
Details about the device are a bit scarce at the moment, so we can only assume that Echo-like functionality is what they are aiming for at the moment. This means that the speakers can not only playback audio, but it will be able to receive voice commands that will get Cortana to do certain tasks for the user.
The extent of Cortana’s capabilities in this form remains to be seen, but if you’re looking for more options to the Echo, you’ll want to keep an eye out for these set of speakers in 2017.
Filed in . Read more about Connected Objects, Cortana, Harman Kardon, IoT (Internet of Things), Microsoft and Speakers.