Roku Speaker?

There are new speculations about Roku coming out with its own voice speaker. Mostly, these cite new team members joining Roku with voice experience. But an Echo competitor? Why jump right away to that conclusion?

For Roku, the simplest path is to have voice control of media by remote and maybe then followed by far field control. Nowadays, there a bunch of ways to do this from different NLU tools, STT services, and even completely outsourcing the work to AVS integration with the new Alexa Video Skills.

Whichever direction, for a new product to get to a competitive level with Home/Echo, it’ll need to surprisingly delight the user. That’s going to be difficult now with a voice speaker.