Xiaomi’s subsidiary Yeelight, which is known for making smart home products, has today officially launched a new product — Yeelight Voice Assistant. As the name itself suggests, it is a smart speaker powered by voice assistant — a first such product from the company.
In terms of looks, the Yeelight Voice Assistant is very much similar to the Amazon Eco Dot which was launched in March last year. The Yeelight’s smart speaker comes with four buttons on the top side — an action button, microphone on/off button, volume up button and volume down button, just like the Eco Dot.
However, the company has also included an additional button in the centre, which can be used to put the speaker in mute mode. Such feature is not available on Amazon’s Eco Dot but is present on the larger versions of the Amazon Echo.
The speaker is believed to have been powered by Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant. Since Xiaomi entered into a partnership with Microsoft last year, all the Mi Smartphones comes pre-installed with Microsoft’s apps. The Mi MIX was the first phone from Xiaomi to feature Cortana.
It comes with six microphones and a single 2-Watt speaker. The company says that the device comes equipped with an advanced voice wake-up algorithm which can turn the device ON within a range of 5 meters. It also comes with advanced Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and Beamforming technology for echo reduction.
It is powered by a 64-bit Cortex A53 quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and is coupled with 256MB RAM and 256MB of flash storage. As of the connectivity options, the device supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz Dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE).
As revealed by the company, the Yeelight Voice Assistant comes with Dual AI systems and can also be used for controlling other smart home products from Xiaomi, such as smart LED bulbs, table lamps, bedside lights, ceiling lights, etc. While it currently supports only Xiaomi smart home products, the company has said that support for more devices will be included in the coming days.
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Currently, the Yeelight Voice Assistant smart speaker has been listed on the company’s crowdsourcing platform for a price of 199 Yuan, which roughly converts to $30. The company is expected to start shipping the device from 31st January in China.
