Libratone, a Danish maker of snazzy high end wireless speakers, has announced its existing Zipp and Zipp Mini speakers will get support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant via a free app update, slated to arrive this fall.
This means existing owners of the speakers will be able to jump aboard the smart speaker craze [1]— and use their Libratone Zipps like an Amazon Echo and ask Alexa to do stuff like look up sports scores, tell a joke, provide a weather update or indeed order something from Amazon.com.
Although — unlike Amazon’s Echo speakers — the Libratone Zipps do not have built-in microphones that are persistently listening for a trigger word.
The company confirmed that users wanting to talk to Alexa will therefore have to manually touch a button on the top of the speaker to do so. So while the quality of Libratone’s audio is more premium than Amazon’s Echo speaker hardware, its existing microphones (previously used to support a conference call functionality) aren’t as tuned for this use-case — ergo there will be more friction between you and Alexa’s ‘lazy web’ answers to your voice commands.
(Or more privacy safeguards between you and Amazon’s data-harvesting AI, depending on your perspective.)
Rival speaker maker Sonos had already been expected to unveil its own voice play on October 4[2]. And according to an FCC filing, Sonos intends to introduce support for multiple voice assistants to existing speaker hardware.
But Libratone’s opening gambit here is to start with just Amazon’s Alexa as its chosen partner for ‘smartifying’ its premium hardware.
Asked why it’s adding Alexa Libratone’s president, Mike Culver, told TechCrunch it had noticed some customers already using their Zipps with Amazon’s entry level Echo Dot...