President of Samsung's mobile division DJ Koh confirms the company is working on its own smart speaker, may announce soon
Samsung is working on a smart speaker that will be launched “soon”, the company's mobile chief told CNBC, which will pit it against the likes of Amazon, Apple, and Google, in the hotly-contested space.
Context & Ripple Effects
This confirmation puts Samsung's name on a project that had only existed as sourcing until now: weeks earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported a Bixby-powered speaker internally code-named Vega, and Samsung's September statement about working with Harman on a speaker assistant pointed the same direction. DJ Koh going on record to CNBC converts rumor into roadmap — and explicitly frames the fight as Samsung versus Amazon, Apple, and Google rather than a me-too accessory.
The arc that follows shows why the 'may announce soon' framing matters: the speaker became the Galaxy Home, unveiled in August 2018 with six speakers and a subwoofer but no price or date, and only reached shelves after Koh committed in 2019 to a launch by April — a long gap between confirmation and delivery that shaped how the product was received.
First-order effects
- Samsung formally enters the smart speaker market against Amazon's Echo, Apple's HomePod, and Google's speaker lineup, with Bixby gaining a dedicated hardware home beyond Galaxy phones.
- Samsung's Harman acquisition gets a consumer-facing role: the audio engineering behind Harman's brands becomes the differentiator for a Samsung-branded speaker, as the company itself signaled in September.
Second-order effects
- The reported ~$200 price point from Samsung's own planning places it in the premium tier against Apple rather than in Amazon and Google's volume price bands, forcing Samsung to win on audio quality and device management rather than price.
- Amazon, Apple, and Google now face a fourth ecosystem player whose real weapon is not the speaker but control of connected Samsung appliances and devices — pushing the incumbents to deepen their own smart-home lock-in.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, voice assistants consolidate into closed hardware ecosystems where each major device maker bundles its own assistant with its own appliances — making the speaker less a product category than a beachhead for smart-home control.
- Samsung's multi-year gap between confirmation, unveiling, and launch illustrates the structural cost of entering a market late: rivals' ecosystems compound while the challenger's assistant waits for hardware, a dynamic likely to shape which assistants survive.
The trend: Voice assistants are consolidating into closed hardware ecosystems, with every major device maker racing to anchor its assistant in a speaker before the smart-home standard settles.