Chinese tech giant unveils a smart home speaker to compete with Amazon

Chinese internet search giant Baidu on Thursday introduced a speaker and two robots as part of its Raven series in a serious push into the highly competitive smart home market. The products, introduced at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, are powered by the company's DuerOS conversational artificial intelligence technology. That system is similar to virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, the Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana. The smart speaker is called Raven H and will be available for purchase in December for about 1,699 yuan ($256). Design-wise, the speaker looks like a stack of thin, colored square blocks and it comes with a touch-sensitive light-emitting diode (LED) display controller.