Xiaomi’s Mi AI Speaker is a sub-RM200 Google Home

Guess we have a new player in the smart speaker game as Xiaomi drops a brand new smart speaker called the Mi AI Speaker. The best part? In classic Xiaomi fashion, it’s far more affordable than it probably should be.

The Mi AI Speaker seems to hit a lot of the notes we’ve come to expect from a connected smart speaker. It’s sleek and quite unassuming, with a status LED on the top to let you know when it’s listening to your commands.

In fact, it looks a lot like a really small Mi Air Purifier — so much so that I thought it was a new Mi Air Purifier — because it sports the familiar not quite oblong shape and design.

On the hardware aspect of things, the Mi AI speaker has a six-microphone array so it can pick up sound from across the room in a 360-degree angle. Xiaomi also says, in a slide, that it has “excellent sound quality” so that must be true, right?

In any case, the Mi AI Speaker is capable of audio beam forming and has advanced echo cancellation.

As a smart speaker, the Mi AI Speaker can do stuff like stream music, read audio books, tell children stories and play live radio among other things. Besides that, Xiaomi also demonstrated the Mi AI Speaker’s ability to connect and control the other smart devices under Xiaomi’s Mi Ecosystem lineup including their rice cooker, bulbs and a bunch more. The Mi AI Speaker also has add-ons and plugins that you can download and program from your smartphone.

“How much?”, I hear you ask. Well, Xiaomi is selling the Mi AI Speaker for CNY299 (around RM189) which is a whole lot cheaper than something like a Google Home (USD 129, around RM552) and more affordable than even the USD49.99 (around RM214) Amazon Echo Dot.

Currently, we don’t know if it will ever make it out of China, or if it will support the English language, but we’ll keep you updated when we get more information.