Samsung confirms launching a smart speaker "soon"

Samsung is working on a smart speaker which it may “announce soon” aiming “to provide a fruitful user experience at home”, Samsung’s Mobile Division President DJ Koh confirmed in a statement to CNBC.

The South Korean tech firm has long been rumoured about developing a smart speaker powered its own digital voice assistant Bixby. An earlier report by Wall Street Journal, citing sources, had said that the “in-progress” Bixby speaker has been codenamed ‘Vega’. However, the firm is yet to decide a tentative launch date for its release.  The report also said the progress of the speaker is held back by slow roll-out of the English-language version of Bixby.

But since Bixby has now been rolled out to over 200 countries across the globe, a smart speaker from Samsung can be expected soon.

If and when launched, the smart speaker will be directly competing against Amazon’s Echo, Google Home and Apple’s HomePod.

"Maybe soon we will announce it. I am already working on it," Koh told CNBC in an interview ahead of the Note 8 smartphone launch which happened on August 23. “As I mentioned I wanted to provide a fruitful user experience at home with Samsung devices, and I want to be moving quite heavily on it,” he added.