Review of Harman Kardon Invoke, a $199 smart speaker with Microsoft's Cortana assistant: great sound, sharp design, but it's twice as costly as Amazon's Echo
A smart speaker for Microsoft's world — For a company that makes a voice-controlled assistant, it has become table stakes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's consumer voice-hardware bet has been a slow reveal: it first took aim at Amazon's Echo with a Cortana speaker announcement back in December 2016, then Harman Kardon formally unveiled the Invoke in May with 360-degree sound and Skype integration. A now-deleted Microsoft Store listing already tipped the $200 price and an October 22 on-sale date before launch.
The Verge's review lands on the central tension of that plan: the Invoke is well-built and sounds great, but at $199 it costs twice what an Echo does — asking buyers to pay a premium for Cortana, an assistant with no comparable device footprint behind it.
First-order effects
- Harman Kardon and Microsoft enter the smart-speaker market competing on audio quality and Skype integration while ceding the price war to Amazon, whose Echo anchors the category at half the cost.
- Buyers choosing Cortana must accept a single-device ecosystem: the Invoke is the only Cortana-powered speaker, so the purchase locks them into one piece of hardware.
Second-order effects
- A year after this review, Microsoft effectively conceded the shelf space battle by stocking Amazon's Echo speakers in its own retail and online stores — an admission that its partner-built hardware could not carry the assistant alone.
Third-order effects
- The endgame already played out: Microsoft ended Cortana support and Harman Kardon stripped Cortana from the Invoke in 2021, leaving early adopters with orphaned hardware — a cautionary pattern where assistants without an ecosystem exit consumer voice hardware entirely rather than fund a losing price war against Amazon and Google.
The trend: Consumer voice-assistant hardware is consolidating around a handful of ecosystem owners, with assistants lacking a device and services footprint — Cortana chief among them — exiting first-party hardware rather than subsidize their way into the market.