Spotify jumps on Samsung partnership news
- Samsung announced its Galaxy Home smart speaker on Thursday.
- The Galaxy Home can play music and answer questions like an Amazon Echo.
- The Galaxy Home is powered by Samsung's Bixby smart assistant.
Samsung announced a new smart speaker Thursday to rival the Amazon Echo and Apple HomePod. It's called the Galaxy Home.
Samsung also announced a new partnership with Spotify that will let users easily play music across Samsung TVs, phones and the Galaxy Home smart speaker. Spotify is the default music streaming service on the Galaxy Home, too. The news pumped Spotify shares up about 5 percent.
The Galaxy Home speaker is powered by Samsung's Bixby smart assistant that can be used to help answer questions, play music and more. The Bixby smart assistant has, until now, only existed on Samsung phones. It has not performed as well as other personal assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.
Samsung's smart speaker has been in development for more than a year.
The Galaxy Home has Samsung's SmartThings hub built inside, which means you can use it to control your lights, thermostat and other smart gadgets around the house, so long as they support the SmartThings platform.
Samsung didn't provide a release date or a price for Galaxy Home and said it will share more information during the Samsung Developer Conference in November.