Aether's Cone speaker aims to play the perfect song every time

Shawn Knight

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Meet the Cone speaker, an Internet of Things newcomer from a startup by the name of Aether. Cone is unlike any other speaker you’ve seen before in that it aims to simplify how you listen to music by learning your habits to determine your mood and the type of music you want to listen to at any given moment.

The device uses a combination of your favorite streaming music services, podcasts or tunes from your mobile device. The interface is incredibly simple – just push the button in the center of the speaker grill to play a tune.

If you want to hear something completely different, simply spin the front edge of the speaker. This will select a different genre completely or may even change inputs and pull from a different source. But there’s more than meets the eye as the system uses machine learning to learn about the song or artist you just skipped. It also keeps a record of what time of the day you prefer to listen to certain jams while an accelerometer even gauges when you move it to another room - all in an effort to help pick a better track next time.

In the event you know exactly what you want to hear, just hold the center button down and speak the name of the song or artist. Conversely, you can pull up the Cone app and select a song from there or stream tunes to the device through your default music app just as you would with a wireless Bluetooth speaker.

The Cone speaker by Aether will be available this summer priced at $399.

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I don't know man, just make a brain probe or something like that and I could stay all day long in chair letting machines doing all the work for me, like pushing buttons and stuff XD
 
How much??? A crummy speaker that looks like an Apollo command module. No thanks, there's nothing wrong with my fingers, I know what the skip track button looks like and how to use it. This type of gimmick is for work shy people who also want a useless heart rate monitor on their phones in case they over exert themselves. Boy I've seen some gimmicky things in my time and this ranks right up there with them.
 
How much??? A crummy speaker that looks like an Apollo command module. No thanks, there's nothing wrong with my fingers, I know what the skip track button looks like and how to use it. This type of gimmick is for work shy people who also want a useless heart rate monitor on their phones in case they over exert themselves. Boy I've seen some gimmicky things in my time and this ranks right up there with them.

No kidding... they coulda put this software in an app and sold it for $5, but what's the fun in that?
I'll just go ahead right now and nominate this product for the award for 'thing I'd never buy without reading every possible online review'. As cool as this sounds, who needs a $400 bluetooth speaker with it's own Shuffle built in?
 
No kidding... they coulda put this software in an app and sold it for $5, but what's the fun in that?
I'll just go ahead right now and nominate this product for the award for 'thing I'd never buy without reading every possible online review'. As cool as this sounds, who needs a $400 bluetooth speaker with it's own Shuffle built in?

For a bose dock people pay a bit more than half of this bluetooth speaker, if sound quality is close to that of the bose dock I don't see why someone wouldn't pay for something like this.
 
I don't see any stats on the sound quality. To me this appears to be an expensive gimmick. How can a mono speaker compete with a proper hi fi?
 
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