Chinese smartphone giant Huawei unveiled the AI Cube on Friday at IFA, one that will make you forget anything you know about a regular cube. This is a redefined cube, and unlike the 3D hexahedron figure, is, round.
Huawei joins the ranks of phone makers in crafting smart speakers; the Alexa-enabled home hub is currently the only rival to Apple’s Home pod, Google home, and the OG Alexa speaker, Amazon’s very own Echo. But don’t make the mistake of thinking of it in terms of being only speakers, it has much greater functions attached to it.
Huawei AI Cube is set aside by its built-in 4G LTE slot, which allows you to create a Wi-Fi hotspot to connect other devices with the speaker. It supports LTE Cat.6 for cellular speeds up to 300Mbps. Also, as an alternative, it has Wi-Fi 802.11ac, which allows you to connect the speaker to your home Wi-Fi network. And if need to be, there is also an RJ45 Ethernet port, just in case you require to connect the speaker to a wired internet connection.
According to the Chinese firm, the sound quality sets the Huawei AI Cube apart from its rivals. The company, which at least until now hasn’t been known for its expertise in audio, has incorporated its own proprietary tech, called Histen, into the Cube, which apparently allows the original timbre of music to be respected. On the top, the speaker has a button to turn the microphone on or off, and two buttons to increase and decrease the volume. The speaker also comes with four microphones for far-field voice recognition. But, we haven’t heard a demo sound yet, so we need to hold our patience till the Christmas season when the speaker is set to be released across European nations. Even the price of the device will not be known until then.
