Alibaba joins the race for manufacturing voice assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Growing demand for home assistants drew the company’s attention. In order to capture a growing market share, Alibaba brings its own home assistant device.
Alibaba brings a smart speaker too!
Name of the new Echo competitor is Tmall Genie X1. In fact, “AliGenie” powers the smart speaker. Additionally, its voice assistant system is similar to the Amazon Echo. Using the device users will know weather updates, news, set a reminder and it can play music.
Picture by Technode
Experts predict that the Genie X1 might cement Alibaba’s leading position in the Chinese e-commerce market.
IDC China managing director Kitty Fok said, “The Tmall Genie X1 will help connect users to Tmall in a more personal way, and could allow Alibaba to sell more smart home devices …”.
Genie X1 will start to be available from August 8, priced at 499 yuan, or about US$73 – cheaper than Google’s US$130 Home offering and Amazon’s US$180 Echo.
The home assistant market is rapidly expanding in the US. According to a report by US analytics firm VoiceLabs, people familiar with the business expect that there will be 24.5 million shipments of such devices in 2017.
However, the home assistant trend is still nascent in China, although companies such as JD.com have led the charge in pushing out such devices.
Nonetheless, talking about bringing a smart speaker, the Chinese giant is late in the competition both internationally and at home.
