CES 2017: Lenovo has an Amazon Alexa-powered smart speaker

Las Vegas - Amazon’s Echo line and Google Home will be joined by another smart speaker and this one even has a closer relation with Amazon’s offerings. Aptly called the Smart Assistant, this voice-controlled speaker runs on the Amazon Alexa cloud-based voice services. So, you can ask it to do some quick web searches for you, play music, update your calendar, etc. Lenovo opted to use Alexa as it’s considered to be the fastest way to get an affordable smart speaker out to the market. Lenovo also has an ongoing partnership with Amazon that it wants to explore. That said, Lenovo reps have told us that they aren’t closing the door on using voice-based platforms of the likes of Google.

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. The Smart Assistant will first be launching in the US and China and it retails or US$129.99. There is a special Harman Kardon Edition of the speaker that costs US$50 more. Both speakers are coming out in the aforementioned markets in May.