Critical Issues Slow Samsung’s Development of Apple HomePod Competitor

In its typical “us, too” fashion, Samsung electronics is reportedly working to develop its own foray into the burgeoning smart speaker market currently dominated by devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The report goes on to cite that while Samsung’s voice-driven virtual assistant speaker will be powered by the same Bixby platform built-into the Galaxy S8/S8+, the device (dubbed project “Vega” internally) has quite a ways to go before it’s ready for the mass market.

According to the report, Samsung’s Vega project has been in development for well over a year now, although it still remains unclear when, or even if, the device could launch. Nevertheless, if it ultimately comes to pass, Samsung’s home speaker would be a late entrance into a market that could one day be split between the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Unfortunately, while the prospect of a Samsung speaker may excite fans of the company’s Galaxy smartphones, there’s just one [major] issue standing in the way of Samsung actualizing its home speaker hopes and dreams — and that would be Bixby, the voice-driven personal assistant platform debuted in the Galaxy S8/S8+, and how it doesn’t understand spoken English that well yet..

Though Bixby is intended to be Samsung’s direct, competitive answer to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, a separate report by The Korea Herald cites that the South Korean company’s “limited access to big data” has ultimately resulted in multiple delays of its widespread rollout in countries other than South Korea.

At present, Bixby is only available to consumers on Samsung’s home turf, and although the company has persistently pledged for a broader rollout of the service in countries like the U.S., Sammy has so far provided no concrete details, and no timeline of when users can expect to get their hands on the service for the very first time. In the interim, therefore, all U.S. Galaxy S8/S8+ owners are left with is a beastly, gorgeous-looking smartphone with a prominent albeit inherently useless side button that, perhaps one day down the road, will actually serve as a dedicated Bixby button.

Apple, meanwhile, made headlines at last month’s WWDC 2017 event, during which the company announced a bounty of exciting new products, including an entirely new 10.5-inch iPad model, refreshed Mac computers, an ultra-powerful new iMac Pro, and what has been dubbed the HomePod speaker. A first-of-its-kind product from the Silicon Valley tech-giant, the HomePod is essentially an uber-premium, standalone speaker system boasting high-quality audio output with its own subwoofer and seven tweeters, as well as built-in support for Apple’s universal voice assistant, Siri. The device will also pack internal components like the iPhone 6’s A8 SoC, as well as “realtime acoustic modeling, audio beam-forming, and multi-channel echo cancelation” — all in a mesh-covered, cylindrical package measuring just seven inches tall.

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