Samsung's Galaxy Home tries to make Bixby a player in the smart speaker world.
Technically, this isn't the company's first smart speaker.
Samsung owns Harman, which also makes the Harman Kardon Invoke, the only Microsoft Cortana speaker out there, and the Amazon Alexa-powered Harman Kardon Allure.
So Samsung already has smart speaker chops.
We saw—but didn't really hear—the Galaxy Home at the company's Note 9 launch event, and we have some initial impressions.
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Design and Sound
The speaker is big and heavy, sitting on three metal legs.
It's larger than Apple's HomePod, although nowhere near as big as the Google Home Max (which is about the size of a cinder block).
Touch-sensitive controls light up on the top with play and pause buttons, and a volume wheel.
How does it sound? No idea.
Samsung claimed at one point that part of its presentation was being played by 160 Galaxy Home speakers, but nobody is likely to have 160 Galaxy Home speakers.
On the demo stand, we weren't allowed to turn the speakers on.
But the spec sheet shows a lot of promise.
The Galaxy Home has six speaker drivers around its periphery, and its bulbous base hides a subwoofer.
Along with omnidirectional sound, Samsung promises that you'll be able to ask it to play sound directly toward you using a voice command, sparing the rest of the room.
It looks to be an entirely wireless speaker.
We checked the bottom, and there are no input or output jacks—just a power cord.
Qualcomm confirmed that the speaker has both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
The Bixby Question
The Galaxy Home is powered by Bixby, Samsung's own voice assistant.
As I said in a column in January, Samsung really wants Bixby to happen because it doesn't want its destiny to be as dependent on Google in the world of 5G as it has been in 4G.
But so far, Bixby hasn't taken off; the top question we get from readers about Bixby isn't how to use it, but how to turn it off.
On phones, that's because Bixby is largely seen as duplicative of Google Assistant, which is on all Samsung Android phones and is better at answering internet-based queries.
Google and Amazon dominate the smart speaker market right now, with Apple playing a smaller role.
Samsung is hoping to win over buyers by integrating Bixby into its various smart home products, including TVs and refrigerators.
The speaker will come with a partnership with Spotify, and Samsung showed a video with Spotify music moving seamlessly, mid-song, from a phone, to a TV, to the speaker.
We still have many questions about the Galaxy Home, including how much it costs and how it sounds.
Samsung will share more details about the speaker during its developer conference on November 7.
