Credit: Fergus Halliday | IDG
If you’re looking to build a smart home around the Google Assistant, it’s hard to go past the first-party hardware on offer.
However, to date, Lenovo has been one of the only third-party brands that have been able to give Google a run for their money through their smart displays. Last year’s Lenovo Smart Display (review here) really impressed us and the looming refresh looks certain to up the ante.
This year’s IFA show the company even showed off a new kind of Android tablet that can easily convert into a smart display when not in use. It also gave us the chance to speak to Dilip Bhatia. He’s Lenovo’s VP of Global Marketing for User & Consumer Experiences, PC and Smart Devices.
With the category already trending towards larger and larger displays, you have to ask whether the consumer tech world is just reinventing TVs. So we did. We also asked him what Lenovo thinks the future of smart display could look like.
He told us that “I think in the future every device will have voice integrated. We'll be surrounded by smart displays and you'll pretty much have ambient computing so to speak.”
“So you could just talk and it'll be like an Alexa, like Cortana, like Google. It's gonna be all around me. Today, I have it in my car, I have it in my house, and I have it in my office, right? We're seeing it already happening and it's only going to get more so.”
Credit: Fergus Halliday | IDG According to Bhatia, “it's all about time comfort, connection, you want to act. You want to be able to get things done, anytime, anywhere, anyplace, right. And you're going to use the appropriate technology. Today we've seen thermostats where you have Alexa integrated, right?”
“Voice is going to be enabled everywhere around us. It’s going to be everywhere,” he says.
Disclosure - PC World Australia's coverage of this year's IFA in Berlin was sponsored by Lenovo who covered the costs of our flights and accommodation.
