Just days after news emerged that Samsung is working on its own AI-equipped speaker, Chinese giant Alibaba is also entering the fray. The Tmall Genie, which does a similar job to Amazon’s Alexa, lets you control your home and offers news, music playback and a raft other skills via voice assistant AliGenie. Unlike Samsung’s as-yet ephemeral offering, however, the Tmall Genie will be available on July 17th for the equivalent of $73.
The device is only available in China and for now only speaks Mandarin. Alibaba isn’t the first Chinese company to foray into the increasingly-saturated smart speaker market: Baidu’s got the Xiaoyu Zaijia and JD.com boasts the LingLong DingDong. However, given Alibaba’s grip on eastern e-commerce and the subsequent mountain of data it has amassed, the company believes it has the potential to become a market leader.
