At an event held in New York City, United States on August 9, the South Korean electronics giants announced a new product —the Samsung Galaxy Home— to mark its debut in the artificial intelligence (AI) driven smart home assistant ecosystem. While the OEM did not fully disclose all the specifications and features of the virtual assistant —we understand that this means Samsung aims to go toe-to-toe with big names like Apple, Google, and Amazon who are already dominating the market— it may be too early to make predictions on whether the company will succeed at it…or not.
But in the meantime, let’s have a peek at some of the properties of the Samsung Galaxy Home who got hold as the official launch is anticipated.
Samsung Galaxy Home: Design
Picture this: a typical big black cauldron (pot) with a narrow opening but big base, sitted comfortably on a metal tripod. Or a pineapple with its crown attached to its bottom. Done?
Well, I don’t know what you thought about but I’m quite sure the product of your virtual imagination looks something near the object in the image below.
The exact dimension of the Galaxy Home are unknown but it sort of appears to be bigger in size than the Google Home and Amazon Echo, perhaps due to the presence of the stainless steel tripod. However, as size isn’t exactly of much significance, Samsung does score extra points for the unique and elegant design and form of the smart speaker.
At the top, indicator lights coupled with a set of physical buttons are located. The body is covered in what seem to be a “texturized fabric cover” and available in Black colour (except Samsung introduces more colour variants during official launch). The legs (tripods) are rubberized at the tips to prevent them scratching off and damaging surfaces the speaker will be placed on.
Music & Audio
During launch, Samsung mentioned that the Galaxy Home will ‘make music sound even more amazing’. Audio in the Galaxy home will be powered by six speakers and a subwoofer based on the AKG Audio technology from Harman, a company Samsung acquired back in 2016 for $8 billion.
For attendants and prospective users to have first-hand audio experience of the Galaxy Home speaker, likewise, its room-filling capability, Samsung used 160 of the speakers to provide the audio during the launch event.
To handle music on the Galaxy Home, Samsung announced its long-term partnership with popular digital music service, Spotify at the announcement event. And not just only on the Galaxy Home, Spotify will be powering Music on other Samsung products henceforward.
Voice Input
As the Samsung’s native virtual assistant, Bixby will be running on the Galaxy Home, proper receipt of voice commands is paramount. This I why the device comes with eight far-field microphones for detecting and picking up voice input and commands.
On a side note, the Bixby Assistant has been updated to become even smarter, understand commands better, and follow up with conversation more smoothly. Probably still not anywhere near Google Assistant or Siri but it sure is a welcomed development.
Samsung Galaxy Home Price and Availability
Not sure if you already picked it up from the intro that Samsung isn’t ready to release the Galaxy Home smart speaker. The announcement at the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 launch event was just to put word out on one of the many next-big-thing it in store.
However, it is certain that the smart speaker will be released in California on November 7 at the upcoming Samsung Developer Conference. And if the device isn’t released at the event, more features, specs, and information regarding release date and pricing will surely be made available.
Nevertheless, price of the Samsung Galaxy Home is expected to be in the range of $300 to $359.
