Lenovo takes on Amazon Echo with Smart Assistant
Lenovo has a smart speaker whose potential customers are easy to define: Everyone who wants an Amazon Echo, but needs better sound.
It's called the Lenovo Smart Assistant, and it's an Alexa-powered digital assistant and speaker. It works just like the Echo: You talk to it, and Alexa talks back, giving you info on things like the weather, and helping you do tasks such as play music or order something from Amazon.
While the Smart Assistant is a cylinder-shaped speaker that looks a lot like the Echo, it comes in a variety of colors, including light grey, green and orange.
And the specs are roughly the same: a tweeter and a subwoofer (just like the Echo) and eight microphones for 360-degree coverage (the Echo has only seven).
However, that's the basic Smart Assistant, which starts at $129.99. If you dish out an extra $50, you can get the Lenovo Smart Assistant Harman Kardon Edition, which comes in black and has an additional 2-inch cavity that should provide clearer treble and deeper bass tones.
As far as other specs are concerned, the device is powered by Intel's Celeron N3060 Processor and has 2GB of RAM as well as 8GB of storage.
Both the regular Smart Assistant and the Harman Kardon Edition variant will become available in May 2017.
Topics Amazon Echo CES Lenovo
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
