New Lenovo Home Assistant dock brings Alexa to Tab 4 devices

Lenovo is jumping on board the digital assistant game with a new accessory for their Tab 4 series of devices. The new Lenovo Home Assistant Pack was revealed at IFA 2017 and it brings the features of an Alexa-enabled smart speaker directly to your Lenovo tablet. It’s unfortunate that Lenovo chose to name their product with “Home Assistant” in the title, which makes it sound like it supports Google Home with Google Assistant. It doesn’t, sadly.

The 3-watt speaker houses two far-field microphones for voice detection, which is a far cry from the seven microphones found in the Amazon Echo. However, if you already have a Lenovo Tab 4 10″ or Lenovo Tab 4 8″ device, this is a good way to get an Amazon Echo-like device on the cheap.

The visuals are provided by a custom Lenovo app that needs to be downloaded on the tablet. From there, the custom app can showcase the weather and the music title and artist when playing music. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to showcase lyrics or offer TV and movie playback so it’s not quite as competitive as the Amazon Echo Show.