Samsung first announced its Galaxy Home smart speaker in 2018, including the Galaxy Home and Galaxy Home Mini. The company was also expected to release the smart speaker last year but that didn’t happen. Some were already tagging the product vaporware but Samsung did assure that the device was being optimized. The Korean tech giant has now finally revealed that the Home Mini smart speaker will be released in 2020.
This was disclosed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)in Las Vegas. The tech giant did specify that the Home Mini will be released in early 2020 but was silent about the Galaxy Home speaker which seems to have been discontinued.
The Galaxy Hom Mini smart speaker will attempt to enter a market that is a bit saturated, dominated by the likes of the Google Home and Amazon Echo speakers. However, Samsung believes they will be able to have their own niche within the whole Samsung ecosystem of smart home devices. There are a couple of factors that should work in Samsung’s favour such as the Bixby smart assistant which powers the speaker.
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Samsung says the smart speaker will be different from others in that it will focus on voice commands rather than a seemingly ongoing conversation between you and the smart speaker. They also want to be able to focus more on the hardware itself rather than the user information that they can gather from your interaction with the smart speaker. The speaker will also be able to connect all the Samsung devices connected through SmartThings and be a central hub for all your smart home devices.
Samsung also says consumer privacy will be at the fore so that all your user information will not have to leave your device and go to a cloud somewhere. They are going for a more hands-off approach when it comes to consumer data, unlike Google and Amazon that both depend a lot on gathering data on how their consumers use the smart speaker and the digital assistant, to be able to bring better services. Being a hardware company, Samsung believes it can minimize data sharing.
The company failed to announce a specific date yet as to when it will be finally introduced to the market.
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