Chinese company LingLong have launched the first Chinese voice assistant and smart home speaker, their answer to Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, It's called the DingDong.
It uses voice interaction to do tasks such as playing music and switching on home appliances and understands Mandarin, Cantonese and a smattering of English.
A study by Juniper Research suggests China's smart home market could be worth $22.8bn (£18.3bn) by 2018.
Beijing based LingLong is owned by Chinese online retailer JD.com - They are currently selling the DingDong for 698 yuan which is $100.
The device can communicate with 95% of the China's population, Beijing Linglong told Wired.
The DingDong also offers English lessons for children
Like Echo and Home, it can be used to control and automate smart home functions including light control, heating and home appliances. Like its rivals, it can also search the internet, traffic and weather information, directions, online shopping, and music streaming.
So far, customers primarily use the DingDong for music, drawing on a library of about 3 million songs. The limited feature set won’t change without far broader third-party support. “Echo is really great in this area,” Liu said. “[We have] 10 services like that, but Amazon announced that they have 4,000. It’s really a big gap.” To close that gap, the company recently made a voice service platform available to developers, and is offering tech support and other incentives to bring them aboard.
