CES 2017: Lenovo preps for the smart home

With our reliance on our gadgets, it makes sense that our homes are becoming more and more high-tech, too. Lenovo takes a stab at the smart home market with two new devices. Both aptly named for what they do: the Smart Assistant and Smart Storage.

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The Smart Assistant is Lenovo’s contribution in the smart home speaker space. It goes against Google Home and Amazon’s Echo line. It’s closely related to Amazon’s offering, though. The voice-controlled Smart Assistant runs on the Amazon Alexa cloud-based voice service. This means you can ask it to do quick web searches for you, update your calendar, play music, etc.

According to Dilip Bhatia, vice president of Global Marketing, User and Customer Experience of Lenovo PC and Smart Device Business Group, the reason Lenovo chose to use Amazon’s platform is that it’s considered the fastest and most affordable way to bring the smart speaker out into the market. Lenovo has an ongoing relationship with Amazon that it wants to explore. However, Bhatia says the company is not closing its doors on releasing Smart Assistant speakers powered by Google’s and Microsoft’s platforms.

The Lenovo Smart Assistant has eight 360-degree far-field microphones with noise suppression and acoustic echo cancellation—letting it pick up voice commands from as far as 16 feet away. It’s available in three different colors at the moment: green, orange, and gray. A black, special Harman Kardon Edition is also available.

As for Smart Storage, it’s a boxy network attached storage for the home. Bhatia says this is Lenovo’s answer for people who are concerned about putting their photos and files in the cloud. It has 6TB capacity, dual-band wireless access, and multi-device auto-sync capabilities. It can store any of your personal files, photos, music, and videos.

With peer-to-peer access, Lenovo promises the Smart Storage is built to be a secure NAS for the home. The highlight or main focus seems to be on photos, though. It has integrated facial recognition software so you can organize your entire photo library based on faces with ease.

The Smart Assistant will first be launching in the US and China and it retails or US$129.99 (around P6,400). The Harman Kardon Edition of the speaker costs US$179.99 (around P8,800). Both speakers are coming out in the aforementioned markets in May. The Smart Storage is also coming to the US in May and its retail price starts at $139.99 (around P6,900).

It isn’t known yet if these products will make it to the country. At the moment, even Lenovo’s competitors in the smart speaker space haven’t brought their products in officially. Of course, the Amazon Alexa platform also limits our ability to use the accessory properly.