Battle of the blue circle assistant: Harman Kardon infused Cortana Home assistant takes on Amazon Echo.

Cortana was one of the nicer things about Windows Phone. As a digital voice assistant, it seemed more human than either Siri or Google Now.

Then Alexa came along and tried to bring that similar sort of interactivity into the home. It was surprising that it wasn’t Cortana trying to be all about your home considering Cortana on phones has already been demoed controlling a bunch of home automation things.

Before millenials whine about how Cortana is ripping off Echo, it’s Echo  that tried to take on Cortana’s symbolic blue circle thing.

It’s a pancake in comparison to Echo and possibly even dot. Unless we’re not seeing a significant amount of it and what we can see is just a wee bit of the top.

It’s headline despite possibly being smaller than echo, is about delivering premium audio.

The speaker system is of Harman/Kardon lineage.  Many might say that sings of class. Harman is quite dominant in the car-speaker industry. Offering luxury sound to drivers of BMW, Audi, Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz cars.

In addition to harman/kardon, they also own AKG and JBL. Most notable, in 2015, they purchased Bang and Olufsen’s automotive business. In turn, in November, Harman was purchased by Samsung.

Something like a voice assistant is so useful when driving. Hands free control of usual smartphone interactions, but without the need to look at a screen or touch a display. Siri seems to have somewhat let herself go.  S-voice is Samsung’s non starter that should be buried for good. Google is getting better, somewhat hit and miss for voice. Sometimes appearing like I’m in star trek and other times inducing vein popping frustration “OKKK GOOOOOGAAAAAL!!!!”. Cortana did the voice assistant thing so well back when I had the 1520 that I really used it for quite a few phone features regarding organising daily tasks, alarms, appointments, sending messages and reminders to pick up things, tell some crucial info when I next speak to a particular person. Although Gnow is getting better with regards to conversational, contextual voice search, Cortana has the backing of some advanced Microsoft AI Research so bags a lot of potential. It’s exciting as

Category: Windows, XboxLive