The Baidu DuerOS is basically Alexa of China. In recent years, the company has built a voice assistant and an ecosystem of hardware partners that, for the most part, supply the Chinese market. At CES this week, the company has talked a little more about its own smart speaker: the amazing Raven H, which looks nothing like what you imagine a smart speaker. In addition, he also showed the Aladdin popIn, a dome lamp with an integrated projector that the company has specially designed for the small apartment that you will find in countries like Japan.
Baidu developed the light / projector with the intelligent projector manufacturer XGIMI and the Baidu popIn brand in Japan. It's great when you think about it. In a small room, you may not have the space needed for a projector and a speaker, but with Aladdin, you get both, plus a smart speaker enabled by the voice hanging from the ceiling.
The Raven H, too, is unusual in that it looks like a stack of LEGO bricks, but with a removable and thin top that works as a standalone voice assistant with a very low resolution touch screen on top .
This removable screen also fits Raven R, a robot with an articulated arm that can dance to your music and which, according to the company, places you in the space and is always aimed at microphone in your direction. move around the room. There seems to be more to that, but the Raven R is not ready for prime time yet and will not go on sale until the end of the year.
In collaboration with his partner Little Fish, Baidu also brought a smart Echo Show type screen to CES, as well as a Sengled smart lamp.
As Kun Jing told me, the general manager of Baidu's Duer business unit, the company is turning to Japan for its first major international expansion of DuerOS because it has already optimized its assistant for the acoustics of small rooms. It does not appear that Baidu plans to bring its software and hardware to the US anytime soon. Jing argued that it's not so much a matter of language support that Baidu does not think his products will work well in major American homes.