Lenovo Smart Display Review: a Google Assistant speaker with a screen

The basic idea behind the new smart screens powered by Google coming this summer is simple: take a Google Home smart speaker and put a screen on it, just like Amazon's Echo Show. Really if that is all you remove from this review, you have the basics.

The Lenovo Smart Display is the first of these new devices on the market. LG, Sony and JBL have also signed to do them. The Lenovo version will go on sale July 27, priced at $ 199 for a model with an 8-inch display and $ 249 for the model I've tested, which has a 10-inch display.

However, there is something more than a simple screen for the Google Assistant. These smart screens run Android Things, an Android-based operating system designed for Internet of Things devices. This means that Google has a new framework with which to work with its Virtual Assistant, without the need to take care of one or the other of the abuses that would come with the full running of android or Chrome.

With this blank slate comes the opportunity for Google to do exactly what it wants to do. And the result is something I did not really expect: a Google device.

Like a piece of hardware, Lenovo takes the stylish Smart Display – especially compared to the 39 Echo Show. It has a large flat screen that sits to the right of a white speaker grille. He is thin on most of the screen, with his back bent behind the speaker. The larger and more expensive version has bamboo at the back, while the smaller one has a much more boring gray plastic.

Designed to work horizontally, but Lenovo places rubber feet vertically. Well, the hardware can, but the software was not designed to work when the Smart Display is in portrait mode (with the exception of Duo video calls), which is a little disappointing. This thing would be much more likely to stand on my crowded kitchen counter if I could stand it up.

Both versions of the Lenovo Smart Display have a 10-watt speaker with two passive tweeters. I've only tested the larger 10-inch version and the sound quality is at best passable – about the same level as Google Home or Amazon's entry-level echo. It can be very loud at maximum volume, but also much distorted. It's very much like a smart speaker for basic things, but far from being as good as a Sonos One or HomePod.

The touch screen is visible even in direct sunlight, but does not brew the room in the dark range, basically, and good automatic brightness settings. But oddly, my favorite feature is not the screen, it's the small hardware switch that moves a shutter to lock the 5-megapixel wide-angle camera. It's true that Google Duo does not support the disconcerting "Drop In" feature like Echo Show and Spot, but I'm always more comfortable putting a smart speaker in my room or in my bathroom. . are just two microphones to recognize your voice, but they seem to do their job well enough until you turn up the volume of music to the maximum. One of the benefits of Google-based speakers is that they manage to recognize the sound of your specific voice and broadcast your personal Google content. With this device, I found that it was a little harder to identify my voice than Google Home, but only a little bit.

If you've ever used a Google Home or a Google Home Mini, the new Lenovo Smart Display will look very similar. The installer works by using the Google Home app on your phone, which will guide you through the standard steps of connecting to Wi-Fi and your Google Account.

Once online, you can perform all the operations you perform on a standard smart speaker or through the Google Assistant on your phone. Say "Hey Google", ask a question or run a command to control a smart gadget, and it's done. Your main interactions with this device always occur with your voice. Touch is there for tricks like tracking taps when something is on the screen, like a play / pause button or a card you want to zoom in on.

Because there is a screen now, a lot of these visual component voice actions. When you ask him to turn on the lights, for example, a screen appears to allow you to adjust the brightness or color temperature. If you happen to have a video source in your daily newsletter, it will read this video before moving on to audio updates. The weather shows a table and some cute animations.

Even timers are better with a screen. You can configure as many as you want (unlike the Apple HomePod) and your timers remain on the screen instead of coming back too quickly to the home screen, as it happens produced on the Echo Show of Amazon

. a Smart Display is in "ambient mode", which shows a rotating slideshow of photos. You can choose from the images provided by Google (art and landscapes and others) or the albums from your Google Photos archive.

Touch the screen and you will get a home screen. On the left you will find the local weather, which you can press to enlarge. On the right, there is a series of cards that mainly serve as suggestions for things you can ask for. You can tap a YouTube video or your calendar entries there, of course, but that's not really the goal.

The map that appears on the Home screen may change depending on the context. If you were watching a video or listening to music, the map for this activity will be the first. If you have an upcoming meeting, the calendar card can be displayed first. If you are concerned that members of your family are seeing your content, the Phone application allows you to not display this information by default.

As with other Google Home devices, you can set it up to recognize different voices associated with different Google Accounts, so your family members can get their personal information. But the display will default to the main account information. And as with other Google Home devices, making it work with your business information is painful. You will need to synchronize your work schedule with your personal calendar, for example.

Dragging from the left edge serves as a return button if you do not want to say "Hey Google, come home" out loud. Dragging from the bottom allows you to adjust the brightness. There are other cool features: you can make traditional phone calls, but when you call, it appears as an unknown number to your recipient. Duo calls worked well in our test, although the Smart Display was sometimes a bit aggressive when calling via Duo when I just wanted an old phone call.

If you are looking for something locally, you will get a great list of Google Maps that allows you to scroll through the photos of the location, get directions and go around one. map. You can also ask follow-up questions about the location, including getting instructions sent to your phone.

It's about it, honestly. It is far from the visual interface. But what really surprised me, is how elegant the design of the software was felt. Except for a few stutterers, the animation was not only fluid and fluid, but also really helpful in showing you what's going on. The fonts are clean, the shadows are consistent and everything is very coherent.

True, this is not a very complex UI system, so it would be a gigantic breath if Google could not do this job. But looking at the work that he's trying to do with hardware themes across Android and Chrome, you can say that the direction that Google wants to go with design is this exact system. This is the clearest statement of what Google thinks that software should look like what I've seen recently.

Beyond the basics, the most fascinating thing to add to the Google Assistant is that Google takes this as an opportunity to evolve how it answers questions. To take the most obvious example: if you ask a practical question like "How can I spin socks?", You will probably get a YouTube video instead of an excerpt from a website .

I really like what happens when you ask for a recipe. Google returns a bunch of possible results from the web, but then reformats them for this view. You get step by step instructions that stay on the screen until you are ready for the next part of the instructions. It's so clever that I immediately wished I could import my own recipes into the system instead of just using what exists on the web.

Here's another more enlightening example: I wanted to test the web search image, so I said "Hey Google, show me pictures of otters." Google came back with a puzzle of an otter I put together on a lazy cab Saturday; I had taken a picture of almost finished work to decry the missing piece. So I asked "when this photo was taken" and Google knew the answer – because it was stored in the metadata of my own photo.

There are two themes to emphasize in these examples. The first is that Google is trying to be more creative in the way it provides answers than before, by pulling multimedia sources from both the web and my own personal information. You never really know when you are going to get a more immersive or personalized answer when you ask the question.

The second theme? Damn, this thing is tightly integrated into the Google ecosystem. He catches YouTube videos. It uses Google website snippets. It serves incredible TV cooking if you are a subscriber to YouTube TV. He knows what my reminders are and where my wedding was. It's really a device that aspires to give you answers instead of web links.

That's not to say that I think this device is basically more scary than other products. I just want to say that the addition of the screen and the ways in which Google has benefited are ten times more interesting if you live entirely GoogleWorld.

That's not to say that it's a Google garden completely closed. Third-party services appear here. You can set your default music player to Spotify or to any of Google's music services. it also directly supports some video services like HBO Now, CNN and Fox News. If you want Netflix or Hulu, however, you will have to go to your phone and track down the Google Cast button. The smart display can act as a Google Cast video endpoint, which is a smart feature – but not as good as just saying "Hey Google, play Stranger Things ." It also supports the same suite of Google actions Google Home does – and third-party developers will be able to create on-screen experiences in time.

It is normal that the Lenovo Smart Display is so clearly designed to sit in the kitchen, because it 's really a device. Google device. Although you can argue that its connection to Google's powerful cloud and artificial intelligence makes it a computer, this sounds a lot more like our idea of ​​what a device really is: simple, focused on a few simple tasks and well designed. ] The Smart Display platform is all this, and it is much more focused on activating Google experiences than any other product I've seen. Whether this suggests a new direction for the company or just what she thought was the best way to bring out this speaker remains to be seen.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence the editorial content, although Vox Media can earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. For more information, see our Ethics Policy .