Turing Robot Serves as the Voice Assistance of Lenovo’s New Concept Intelligent Home Device “Smart Cast+”

The Tech World Event of Lenovo was held in Shanghai on July 20th, 2017. AI played the biggest role this year. Turing Robot serves as the voice assistant of Lenovo’s latest Concept home device Smart Cast+ which was quite remarkable at the event.

In recent years, intelligent home devices are seeing more and more adoptions. Major companies are producing these products, such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Google Home. In mid 2017, Apple also published its home device with Siri inside called Home Pod. Compared to the extreme competition overseas, the home devices industry in China seems a little bit quiet. Xiaomi, JD, Baidu and Alibaba all have sold similar products.

For the home device industry in and outside of China, the one difficulty they all face is the immature intelligent home furnishing ecosystem. To stay competitive in the market, voice interface is the key, as it weighs the most in the experience and intelligence level of a home device. Take Echo for example, in 2014, when Echo made its first appearance, its relatively poor function didn’t get Amazon much applause. But then things changed when Alexa joined the game.

Early this year, Lenovo released a home device that looked a lot like Echo, which had both an English and Chinese version. Its English version used Alexa as Echo did, and the Chinese version was provided by Lenovo Academy. But this time with Smart Cast+, not only its appearance is more creative, but also its Chinese voice assistant was provided by Turing Robot.

Turing Robot has abundant data resources in the areas of voice assistant. Early in 2012, Turing Robot launched an app called Wormhole, a voice assistant app, announced its stepping into the war of voice assistant. Recently, Turing Robot’s open platform has over 600,000 enterprises and developers, which made Turing Robot the world’s biggest open platform for a chat bot. The large data storage that Turing Robot possesses guarantees Smart Cast+’s experience at its voice interface level.

Having Turing Robot as its voice assistant, Smart Cast’s users can “wake up” SmartCast+ by saying “Hello, Lenovo” and find songs and movies using their voices. Users can also search for information such as weather forecast, stories, encyclopedias, FAQ and so on. Turing Robot not only plays the role of voice assistant, but works more like an operating system.

SmartCast+ is a smart speaker with projection, plus the function of object recognition and AR interaction. This means users can not only talk to it, but also touch the screen projected on the desk, just like the way you interact with a tablet.

Presently, SmartCast+ is no more than a concept product, its release is still pending. Can Lenovo and Turing Robot can copy the success of Amazon and Alexa? Let’s wait and see.