Chinese electronics manufacturer Xioami on Wednesday launched its latest Mi 5X smartphone at an event in Beijing, China along with MIUI 9 custom ROM. Alongside, the company has also announced a brand new Artificial intelligence-enabled smart speaker with voice assistant, dubbed as the “Mi AI Speaker” in its homeland, China. The Mi AI Speaker has been launched in China with a price tag of CNY 299 (approximately Rs. 2,850) and it will be available for beta testing in China starting early of August. Carried a such an attractive price tag, the Mi AI Speaker will compete against the Alibaba’s Tmall Genie X1 ($73), Google Home ($129) and Amazon Echo ($179.99). Unfortunately, the company has made no official announcements about the latest Mi AI Speaker’s international availability.
The Xiaomi Mi AI Speaker comes equipped with a six omnidirectional microphone array for 360-degree audio sensing and advanced echo cancellation. Like the other smart speakers, the Mi AI Speaker also responds to voice commands, play audio, and is capable of controlling smart home appliances such as turn on/off smart lights, switch on/off a smart TV, adjust the AC cooling temperature, etc. The Xiaomi MI AI Speaker is also capable of replying your queries, take calls, add events to a calendar, weather updates and much more. Apart from this, the Mi smart speaker has a large online content library that includes music, live radio, children stories and audio books.
The main highlight of the Xiaomi Mi AI Speaker is its SoundMi artificial intelligence technology, a company’s own AI personal assistant based system that learns the user’s daily patterns to provide useful recommendations and friendly advice. The voice-controlled speaker offers superior sound quality when you ask it to play music, live radio, kids stories and audio books.
Technically speaking, the Mi AI Speaker is powered by a 64-bit 1.2GHz quad-core processor coupled with 256MB of RAM and 256MB of internal memory. It comes loaded with six omnidirectional microphones and a 2.25-inch speaker with a passive subwoofer for delivering best sound quality. On the top, it houses control keys for music playback and a blue LED light ring all around the top edges, that illuminates when the speaker is on. Connectivity features offered by the Mi AI Speaker include dual-band Wi-Fi, DLNA and Bluetooth 4.1 with A2DP. Using the Mi AI Speaker app on your smartphone, you can also enable additional add-ons and plugins for the Mi AI Speaker.
