Yanko Design

A smart speaker with a detachable display lets you own a tablet + smart speaker!

Nearly one in every four homes in the United States of America has a smart speaker in it. That’s a real statistic, not a guess. I’d say roughly the same amount also own a tablet, like an iPad or a Surface. So why not mash the two products together? Weilin D’s AI Assistant is a combination of a tablet and a smart speaker… and its framework is pretty familiar. In fact, it looks a lot like an Amazon Echo Show, or a Google Home Hub, but with a couple of key differences.

Weilin’s AI Assistant comes as a smart-speaker with a display, but here’s where things get interesting. The display is completely detachable. Designed to be used as a tablet you’d have around the house, the AI Assistant’s detachable display is great for watching content, viewing recipes, checking the time, or having as an ambient, ever-changing photo frame. The display detaches off the dock, which is the smart-speaker. Built with a wireless charger, the dock can juice up the tablet’s battery when idle, and has a far-field microphone that allows you to use the AI Assistant as a smart speaker to command it to play music, answer or reject calls, set reminders, control smart-home products, or order stuff online. Housed within the dock is also a sliding camera that conveniently stays blocked by the tablet. When you’re in the mood for a video conference, the camera slides up and allows you to do video-chats with other people, quite like Facebook’s Portal device, but with a stronger focus on privacy. Once you’re done, the camera slides back into its enclosure.

Designer: Weilin D

Sarang Sheth
Sarang is the co-editor in chief of Yanko Design. He is a former industrial designer at a Bangalore-based multidisciplinary design studio, working in areas including appliances, FMCG, packaging, technology, luxury, etc. Sarang has written about design and technology for over a decade and has been a jury member on international design awards. He occasionally works on tech concepts featured on Forbes, The Verge, Hypebeast, Digital Trends, SlashGear, Tom's Guide, LetsGoDigital, and Unbox Therapy. Sarang graduated from MIT Institute of Design, Pune.
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