Google Introduces Nest Audio Smart Speaker With Focus on Music Reproduction

Google held the company's traditional hardware announcements event. Apart from a new mandatory phone, the star of the event was the new Nest Audio smart speaker, bigger and more powerful than the Google Home that it replaces. Rumored for months, the new smart speaker reflects the hard work by a dedicated engineering team, resulting in a better overall speaker design, but also improved multi-room streaming features. Inside, there's more intelligence to support voice commands locally, and there's even a microphone "privacy" mute switch, when required.

Embedded wireless audio and voice solutions provider, Libre Wireless Technologies announced that the RIVA Concert and RIVA Stadium wireless audio speakers are re-launching in a 2.0 version that now includes all the latest features offered in Amazon Alexa Built-In services with a special focus on Amazon’s new Multiroom Music (“MRM”) capabilities. RIVA launched the Amazon "voice-enabled" speakers in 2018, already working with Libre Wireless, and superseding all previous models launched by RIVA Audio until 2017.

Qualcomm made two important announcements for audio developers, both bound to significantly impact the fast-growing market of smart speakers and new generation whole-home audio systems. The San Diego company announced the new QCS400 family of audio SoCs and the Smart Audio Platform 400 development kit, bringing smart speakers high-performance processing, Qualcomm AI Engine, superior connectivity, and multiple advanced audio and visual display capabilities in a single, power-optimized chip architecture.

Apple's opening keynote for its Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 (WWDC17) at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, was a swirl of long expected announcements, wrapped in surprising underlying technology revelations. Among the many announcements was the preview of Apple's new home music speaker with built-in-far-field voice recognition powered by Apple Siri, the HomePod. As expected, the design is a powerful combination of electroacoustic mastery, digital processing and smart connectivity.

Founded in 2002, Sonos is now present in more than 60 countries, and already supports dozens of streaming music providers. Still, the company’s networked home sound systems have remained a closed-garden concerning software and remote control integration. Now, Sonos wants to change all that and announced new partnerships with Amazon for voice control, a new level of software integration with Spotify, and control integration with AV control manufacturers such as Crestron, Lutron, Savant, Control4, and iPort, among others.