It was just announced, during Google I/O, that Mobvoi became Google’s official Google Assistant partner. Mobvoi’s CEO, Zhifei Li, spoke at Google I/O, and said that the company is really proud of this, and that he believes that Google Assistant “is capable of delivering compelling user experiences with its years of persistent exploration and accumulated experiences in R&D, as well as core AI technologies that include speech and language processing, dialogue management, and question answering“.
Now, the company also announced that that it will announce a new home product later this year, the Tichome Mini. For those of you who don’t know, Mobvoi is actually an AI tech company which develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, vertical search, etc. This company is based in Beijing, and they’ve introduced three products thus far, the Ticwatch and Ticwatch 2 smartwatch, and the Ticmirror, a smart rear-view mirror which is available in China only, at least for now. Now, it’s also worth mentioning that the company launched the Ticwatch 2 Global Edition on Kickstarter back in July 2016, and managed to raise over $2 million in only 30 days, which suggests some consumers were quite happy with the first iteration of this smartwatch. Having said that, we’ve reviewed the Mobvoi Ticwatch 2 a while back, if that’s something you’re interested in. This smartwatch is quite interesting, it looks like a normal watch, and yet it comes with a number of smartwatch functions, as it ships with a custom version of Android 5.1.1 Lollipop.
That being said, the company actually provided some official images of the Tichome Mini for us to check out. If you take a look at the gallery down below, you’ll be able to see Mobvoi’s Tichome Mini speaker / virtual assistant. The company did not provide any spec detail when it comes to this product, so we don’t know what exactly to expect, but we presume that this speaker will be quite similar to the Google Home in terms of functionality, though, as you can see, it’s quite small and extremely portable. Based on the band that comes attached to this speaker, and its size, we presume that it is meant to be carried around, and the company’s promo images also suggest that. We’ll report back as soon as Mobvoi releases more info about the Tichome Mini, so stay tuned for that.
