CES 2017: Lenovo announces Alexa-powered Smart Assistant along with Smart Storage

Lenovo has announced the products that it will be showcasing at CES 2017 starting from 5 January 2017. One field that the company will focus on is digital assistants and storage systems in a bit to improve their take on Smart Homes. The company detailed both the products in a blog post on their website.

According to Lenovo, analysts are predicting a slow adoption of the IoT space despite it being a huge growth area. Lenovo says that the slow adoption is due to two reasons. First reason being the high-cost factor while investing in IoT devices and the second one being the lack of consumer-centric design while developing these products. The company wants to change this by bringing the cost factor down with its products. The company teamed up with Amazon to make its first product, Lenovo Smart Assistant, powered by cloud-based personal assistant Amazon Alexa.

Smart Assistant works almost similar to how Amazon Echo works where the device recognises voice commands given by the user and uses Alexa to conduct web searches, playing music, creating lists, reminders, calendar updates and more. Alexa will get smarter with time as you use the device.

The company has added eight 360-degree far-field microphones with noise suppression and acoustic echo cancellation to ensure that the assistant can pick up voice commands from 16 feet away. Lenovo will release a second variant with Harman Kardon edition for premium audio quality for home entertainment and music. Lenovo has ensured that Smart Assistant will run Lenovo smart home devices as well as other third-party connected devices to ensure maximum compatibility.

Steve Rabuchin, Vice President of Amazon Alexa, added, “We’re excited to work with an innovative company such as Lenovo to bring the Lenovo Smart Assistant with Alexa to customers this spring.” Lenovo Smart Assistant will start selling at $129.99 (approx Rs 8,200) in Light Gray, Green and Orange options from May 2017 with the Harman Kordon Edition starting at $179.99 (approx Rs 12,300) from May 2017.

The second device launched for the smart home category is Lenovo Smart Storage. It is a secure digital storage solution with 6TB storage capacity, dual-band wireless access and multi-device auto-sync capability. The company has designed security and P2P access for the stored data like images, documents, music and movies. Smart Storage includes facial recognition software that can help organise your photo library based on faces. It will be available for $139.99 (approx Rs 9,600) from May 2017 along with Smart Assistant.