It was first reported last year that Facebook was planning to launch its own smart speaker in 2018. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if Facebook did that given that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google have all released similar products in the past couple of years. Amazon is far ahead of its rivals in this space already. A new report today claims that Facebook is going to launch two smart speakers with 15 displays in July this year.
According to the report, Facebook’s smart speakers will be positioned as devices that enable family and friends to easily remain in touch through video chat and various social features powered by Facebook.
Facebook was apparently going to launch these devices in May 2018 but is said to have pushed back the release as it wants more time to perfect the acoustic quality of the speakers and make additional tweaks to the software.
How will the two 15 inch smart speakers be differentiated? One is said to feature facial recognition to identify users for accessing Facebook through a wide-angle lens on the front. The other is said to be more focused on social networking and music streaming.
Voice commands will reportedly be supported as well but it’s unclear if an existing voice assistant like Cortana or Alexa will be used, given that Facebook doesn’t really have a conversational digital assistant of its own.
There isn’t a lot of information available about these products right now so take this report with a grain of salt. It’s far from confirmed at this point in time that Facebook has smart speakers in the pipeline that will be out in July.
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