NEW DELHI: Taking on Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers, on Tuesday brought its voice-activated speakers "Home" and "Home Mini" to India that can help people with their commute, play favourite songs and videos, plan daily schedule and lots more.
Powered by Assistant, "Home" and "Home Mini" are priced at Rs 9,999 and Rs 4,499, respectively, and will be integrated with Hindi language support by the end of this year.
"We will launch Hindi language support later this year so that users can choose the language they are comfortable with. Both the devices understand Indian accents and will respond with uniquely 'desi' contexts," Rishi Chandra, Vice President of Product Management and General Manager of Home Products, told reporters here.
The smart home speakers will be available for purchase online on Flipkart and at over 750 retail stores.
"We have been working with many local partners to customise Home for India. We will offer free six months of Play Music -- a music and podcast streaming service -- and special offers from commercial music streaming service Gaana," Chandra added.
"Home Mini" is available in two colours -- chalk and charcoal -- while "Home" will be available initially in chalk only -- with coral coming soon).
"Home" or "Home Mini" on Flipkart will come with a free Jio-Fi router along with special offers on music subscriptions.
"When buying a 'Home' at Reliance Digital or MyJio stores, you get a free JioFi router with 100GB of high-speed 4G data (worth Rs 2,499)," the company said in a statement.
The top surface of the devices has LEDs that light up when "Home" recognises "OK ".
"Home" has been designed with two microphones that utilise a technique called "neural beamforming" to enable accurate far-field voice recognition.
has simulated hundreds of thousands of noisy environments and applied Machine Learning (ML) to recognise patterns that allow it to filter and separate speech from noise.