Earlier today, during their Mobile World Congress press event for 2016, Sony had new smartphones to announce in the form of the Xperia X range, including the Xperia X, Xperia XA and Xperia X Performance. They also had their rumored Moto Hint competitor to show off as well as some interesting “Xperia Concepts”, these include a portable projector of sorts, a wearable camera and perhaps most interesting the Xperia Agent. These new concepts seem to represent a push of Sony’s to use the Xperia branding for more than just smartphones and tablets. We took a look at the Xperia Projector earlier and have all the info on the Xperia X line here, but let’s take a look at the Xperia Agent.
Essentially a sort of smart house assistant, the Xperia Agent will remind people of the Amazon Echo, but with a face as well as a sort of display, too. On stage at their event, Sony didn’t have much to say about the Xperia Agent, and while the video below does an okay job of quickly highlighting its uses, it’s unclear what Sony have planned for it more than the usual menial voice-command tasks. Still, it looks as though Sony is looking to branch out further into the wearable space and IoT area, and these concepts are Sony’s way of doing things. It’s likely that the Xperia Agent will be similar to the BSP60, a smart Bluetooth speaker that looked like an oldschool alarm clock Sony released some time ago. The BSP60 could respond to voice commands as well as function as well, an alarm clock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0B_lGEqTy4
Hopefully, we’ll learn more about the Xperia Agent soon, but right now Sony is promising something that will provide “you with useful information, communication assistance and home appliance controls” and are calling it their “vision for a personalised assistant”. Whatever the end product actually ends up being called, it is nice to see Sony branching out and exploring new areas once again, as there are too many companies out there simply offering the same thing these days. We’d assume that Amazon would be more than happy to remind Sony that they were first with the Echo, though.
