UpdateAmazon Echo meet Raven, the AI-enabled home speaker just launched by China’s biggest search engine

The battle for artificial intelligence-enabled home speakers that is being waged between Amazon, Google and Apple in the US is similarly being fought in China by more than 100 local companies. On Thursday Baidu, the country’s dominant search-engine operator, entered the fray with its own voice-activated speaker in a fight for the future of smart homes in the world’s most populous nation.

Raven H is Baidu’s latest push into the commercialisation of artificial intelligence (AI), the centrepiece of its business revival plan following its February takeover of Beijing start-up Raven Tech, a developer of smart speakers similar to Amazon’s Echo.

“Humans and machines have been interacting with one another for years, but Raven H aims to create a world in which this interaction is seamless,” said Cheng Lyu, who heads Baidu’s intelligent hardware unit and was founder of Raven Tech.

Baidu is a new player in the global market for voice-activated smart home devices, currently dominated by Amazon, Google and Apple which are in fierce competition for English speaking customers in North America. However, none of the US companies have made a dent in the mainland Chinese market, partly due to the complexities of mastering the Chinese language. The mainland market is already overcrowded with more than 100 smart speaker developers, including the Tmall Genie developed by Alibaba Group, owner of the South China Morning Post.

“These smart speakers and AI home robots may sound like a small step in the history of technology, but they will help people’s everyday lives and bring them an experience once only seen in sci-fi movies,” he said.