About ten days ago, Xiaomi presented XiaoAI Art Speaker, its new speaker connected to the false tunes of Sonos, but offered at a much more aggressive price of… 40 €! Can we expect great sound quality at this price? There is little chance, to tell the truth, but this speaker still has serious arguments to put forward ...
XiaoAI Art Speaker: a pleasant design but not very original
The first thing that strikes you is obviously its resemblance to a well-known connected speaker: the Sonos One. Or, more exactly with the Sonos Play: 1 in terms of colors, just put them next to realize it ...
Made of white ABS plastic, it is surrounded by a metallic grid of silver gray color and does not bear a Sonos logo but that of Xiaomi. On its top, there are obviously volume control buttons, mute the microphone and even playback.
Like a speaker Amazon Echo, it is finally surrounded by a LED light ring with 16 million colors able to come alive to the rhythm of the music. That, on the other hand, is more original and quite nice!
Le XiaoAI Smart Speaker will propose multi-room and even stereo pair, all supported by a DTS amplifier, probably in the new multi-channel sound format for Home Cinema (DTS X Pro). Although we are a little skeptical because of its unique 2.5 cm speaker, Xiaomi seems to have set the bar much higher than on its previous models and want to venture into the HomePod playground, Echo Studio and therefore Sonos One. But the comparison stops there since this speaker does not embed either Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, but Xiaomi's home voice assistant: XiaoAI.
XiaoAI: a voice assistant on the rise
Launched in 2018, XiaoAI - contraction of Xiaomi and AI for artificial intelligence - is logically the voice assistant embedded in this speaker. Although it is not yet as good as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, its success in China is growing according to the brand which claims a 54.9% increase in users in one year.
XiaoAI currently offers a library of 1600 voice applications, the equivalent of Alexa skills, which make it possible to control a large number of devices and in particular the Xiaomi home automation, Aqara or even Philips Hue. A number still far from 2400 skills in French offered by Amazon, but in constant evolution, although the assistant is still confined to Asian languages, which explains its only availability in Asia.
Technical characteristics of the Xiaomi Art Speaker