The intelligent speakers are one of the trends that are gaining strength from one year to this part. There is almost no brand worth its salt that does not have one of these products in its catalog. Google, Apple, Amazon even Facebook is present with the Portal range. A list missing from Microsoft.
The Redmond company does not have a speaker with integrated virtual assistant or not at least its own speaker. It is true that Harman Kardon launched Invoke, a model with Cortana that however did not have the expected success. And in this scenario, it is surprising that we now see a two-year patent that shows a speaker similar to the Google Home Mini that we have not known until now.
Invoke did not achieve the success they wanted
A patent registered in the USPTO that reveals a portable speaker that in the purest Google Home Mini or Amazon Echo Dot style would be signed by Microsoft. That is at least what follows from the filtered images.
In them you can see a speaker with a circular shape in which physical controls of call, volume and silence are embedded in the upper part. A patent that already has its time, since it dates from 2017, something that can mean that it has been forgotten.
Too much time for not seeing results can be a bad omen. However, if the patent did not come to fruition it served to make it clear that at Microsoft they already thought about these types of developments that have later become so popular.