Samsung's Bixby enhanced speaker is almost here, and it comes with a competitive price tag

Samsung continues to push its own virtual assistant and appears it is now ready to make it a part of your home by releasing a speaker with Bixby capabilities.

The new device is expected to be launched next month, probably alongside the new Galaxy Note 9 (scheduled for August 9). According to the sources, the speaker will be bowl-shaped (upside-down bowl is what you should probably imagine), likely featuring multiple speakers facing different directions, similar to Apple's HomePod.

The speakers will provide a feature called "sound shifting", which is a function that tracks the person giving the commands and beams the sound towards his/her location. Samsung appears to be putting the emphasis on the high-quality audio of the device rather than the Bixby functionality.

Earlier this year Samsung announced that the Note 9 will be the first device to have a new "Bixby 2.0", which makes it obvious that a dedicated Bixby product will have the improved version as well. How well it will fare compared to the holy trinity – Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, we'll see once we put them side-by-side.

The price of the speaker, bearing the code-name "Lux", is rumored to be around $300. Its expected competitors are the HomePod, priced at $349 and Google Home Max at $399. If it will match their performance, we'll find out next month.

source: WSJ