Harman Kardon has officially announced the first intelligent speaker to feature Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant, following a teaser earlier on Monday.
The new Harman Kardon Invoke is the result of a partnership between Microsoft and the Samsung-owned audio firm and, much like the Amazon Echo, it features a cylindrical 360-degree speaker with far-field voice-activated microphones.
Like its soon-to-be-rival, Invoke can play music and offer ‘room filling’ sound and control smart home devices. It'll manage calendars, check news and traffic and much more.
However, it also has a string to its bow the Amazon Echo series and Google Home do not possess: the ability to make and receive voice calls. Naturally, it's Microsoft's Skype handling that side of things.
It also integrates Harman’s beam forming, echo cancellation and noise reduction algorithms enabling the Invoke to rise above “challenging” ambient noise and still hear your commands.
There’s also a so-called “touch to surprise” interface panel on top of the device, although the companies haven’t gone into deal on exactly how it’ll work.
It looks like it’s only coming to the US market - at least initially - with availability from the Microsoft Store and select retailers.
It’ll arrive in two colours, Peal Silver (White) and Graphite (Black).
Last year, Harman teased a new speaker that would feature Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana. We hadn't heard much since – until today, anyway. Earlier on Monday, Harman launched a dedicated webpage for the speaker and now it's official.
With some details still to be confirmed, we're guessing that Microsoft will unveil the speaker properly at its annual Build developer conference, which is due to kick off in Washington state this week.
The conference runs from May 10 to May 12, and will almost certainly see the debut of some new software and hardware. However, Microsoft hasn’t confirmed that this will be the case, so stay tuned.
In any case, it’s no surprise that Microsoft is developing a smart speaker, given the continuing success of the Amazon Echo, which launched back in 2014. Even Google has got in on the action with the recent debut of its Google Home smart speaker, running on the company's Google Assistant software. And there’s no shortage of rumours suggesting that Apple is nearly ready to unveil a smart speaker powered by Siri, the digital assistant that iPhone and iPad users will already be familiar with.
