Jordan O'BrienThe Amazon Echo and Google Home currently hold a duopoly on the smart speaker market, but there’s no shortage of competition for the two devices. Unfortunately, much of that competition has fell short, with the likes of the Apple HomePod delivering impactful sound but a disappointing voice assistant. Not wanting to miss out, Samsung has already confirmed plans to launch its own Amazon Echo competitor, although since that announcement the company has remained eerily silent.
Samsung is now confirming that the Galaxy Home has been delayed, with the firm hoping to launch it between July and September. That’s not a huge delay, considering it had aimed to release the smart speaker in the first half of the year, but it does give Amazon and Google even more room to strengthen their grip on the market.
The Galaxy Home was first announced in August 2018 and is set to be powered by Samsung’s own AI, Bixby. It was shown off again earlier this year at CES 2019, although pundits criticised its limited abilities – much of which can be attributed to the lacklustre Bixby assistant. We’re still disappointed that Samsung is focused on launching the Galaxy Home with Bixby, as it lags far behind Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant, and while subsequent updates to the AI on Samsung’s smartphones and TVs has made it better, it’s not quite on-par with its competitors.
Even with this delay, it’s not certain how Samsung will manage to carve a space in the market for the Galaxy Home. While the brand is popular around the world, it doesn’t quite have the same fanatic base that boosted Apple’s HomePod, but Samsung does have one ace up its sleeve – sound. Thanks to its acquisition of Harman, Samsung has a lot of sound experts in its employment, and that should hopefully lead to an impressive-sounding speaker. Although Samsung will have to compete with the Apple HomePod and Sonos One at the premium-end of the market.