At the Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes last week, Aether co-founder Duncan Lamb showed off a new speaker called Cone that connects to your home wireless network to stream music and other audio. So far, nothing unique about that. But unlike other wireless speakers, you control the music directly from the speaker itself rather than from a phone, tablet or computer.
Thanks to cloud-based voice recognition, you can tell it what you want to hear or you can select a song by turning a dial. If you don’t like the song, you turn the dial again and it picks another one. Eventually, according to Lamb, Cone learns what you like to listen to based on when and where you’re listening. It may come to realize that you like rock in the morning, folk in the afternoon and classical at night, for example. Or it may learn that you like to listen to certain music in certain rooms if you move the transportable speaker to another room.
A single (monaural) Cone speaker costs $399 and will be available early summer.
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