Here’s our first look at Harman Kardon’s Cortana speaker

Microsoft showed off a bunch of hardware at its Computex Taipei presentation today, most of which we’d seen before. One thing we’d never seen in person, however, is Harman Kardon’s Invoke — the audio company’s take on a digital assistant speaker, powered by Microsoft’s Cortana.

Unfortunately the Invoke demo unit was not turned on or plugged in, so all I can report to you is that it is indeed cylindrical and looks at least as up to the task of imprisoning an AI assistant as the Amazon Echo. It ought to sound better, too, given Harman Kardon’s audio pedigree and inclusion of three times as many woofers and drivers. The main question, of course, is how well Cortana performs in a device like this.

The Invoke is set to ship this fall for an...

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