There’s a saying in retail that goes, “Nobody cares who did it first; they care who did it best.” The fast-moving nature of the tech industry means that there’s always a chance for the next guy to steal the spotlight from the last cycle’s winner, and Sony is trying to do just that.
Wired reported on Sony’s Xperia Agent, a modular take on Amazon’s hands-free digital personal assistant and at-home Bluetooth speaker, Amazon Echo. One of Sony’s flagship launches at this year’s Mobile World Congress, Don Mesa, head of marketing for North America at Sony, explained how his company hopes the Xperia Agent can one day be the instantly upgradeable at-home digital assistant that Amazon’s Echo can’t.
Key to that is the suite of add-on attachments that Sony plans to sell with the base Xperia Agent device, which functions similarly to the Echo. However, Wired noted that Sony wants to make the way its customers interact with the Agent even more flexible and inclusive than the voice-based instructions for Amazon’s device. With add-ons like the Xperia Ear headset, the Xperia Eye camera and the Xperia Projector, Sony thinks customers are going to jump at the chance to customize their Agents to create a composite that matches the most common ways they like to interact with the Internet of Things around them — be that speech, movement or sight.
That, plus its design with an articulating head and blinking eyes, makes Mesa think it’ll be more easily accepted by consumers.
“It feels like it’s more of a natural, human interface you can have a conversation with,” Mesa told Wired.
Mesa stressed that the products were still in the development stage and could change based on customer feedback before the final versions are pressed and shipped. However, the Agent could represent a trend toward customization in the future of IoT devices that mobile device companies haven’t been able to push for quite some time.
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