Do you hear an Echo? Baidu’s personal assistant tech to power Harman speakers

Artificial intelligence from Chinese tech giant Baidu will be incorporated into Harman Kardon speakers, according to Baidu.

The announcement comes a day after speaker maker Sonos teamed up with Amazon’s Alexa.

Utilizing Baidu A.I., speech-enabled Harman speakers will let users carry out tasks, shop, and search the internet with their voice.

The integration was announced at the annual Baidu World conference. With more than a billion visitors a month, Baidu is, among other things, the fourth-most-popular website in the world, according to Alexa data.

“Baidu A.I. technologies that will be incorporated into Harman Kardon include automatic speech recognition (ASR) in English and Mandarin, on-device wake word, natural language understanding (NLU) and processing (NLP), text-to-speech (TSS), voiceprint, a recommendation system, and a dialog system,” a Baidu spokesperson said.

Development of personal assistants will begin immediately, but no timeline has been set for when consumers can expect to be able to order a Harman Kardon speaker for their home.

At last year’s Baidu World, Baidu unveiled its virtual assistant Duer and added it to Baidu apps.

In January 2015, Baidu and Harman started working together on Carlife to compete with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Carlife can make calls, get directions, and operate third-party apps. Automotive partners include BMW, General Motors, and Mercedes-Benz.