At the IFA press conference in Berlin, Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu announced their first smart speaker: the Huawei AI Cube with in-built Amazon Alexa and a bundled 4G modem. The AI Cube is different from any other smart speaker we’re aware of by including a full 4G wireless router in the speaker.
Unfortunately, Huawei currently have no plans to being the hybrid speaker/ router device to Australian shores at this time. The smart speaker component includes far field array microphones for trouble-free 360 voice detection, and a 400ml sound cavity for improved audio performance. With Amazon Alexa on-board Huawei can launch their speaker with the support of a full ecosystem of partners, skills and developers.
The LTE router portion of the device offers a Cat6 LTE modem with up to 300Mbps network speed. For connectivity to your devices it offers dual band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac. We are still waiting on details but from what was announced on stage it looks like the device would include a battery making this both a portable speaker and a portable 4G hotspot, I have to say that’s an intriguing idea.
