SberBoom Mini smart speaker is an affordable home assistant

Contents of delivery
Specifications
Positioning
Design, features

settings, controls
Initial setup
Other smart speaker features - smart home control and more
Impression

Contents of delivery

Column
Charger with non-removable wire
Instruction
Warranty card

Specifications

Noise detector
Acoustics 360°
stereo pair
Multiroom
Voice control in Bluetooth mode
Smart home control
Salyut virtual assistants
Built-in microphones - yes, 2 pcs.
Sound power - 5 W
Wireless interfaces - Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 2.4 / 5 GHz
Dimensions - 57x57x95 mm
5 body colors: Foggy White, Neptune Blue, Cloudless Blue, Martian Red and Starry Yellow
Cost - 3 990 rubles

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Positioning

The Russian market of smart speakers is a phenomenon insomehow unique. Nowhere in the world, except for the United States, there is such aggressive competition in this segment, and there are no voice assistants of their own either. Thanks to the efforts of Yandex, voice assistants have become a familiar feature of the modern home, they are used to control a smart home, questions and utility functions, for example, you can quickly turn on an alarm or timer, set a fairy tale for a child. In 2022, about 3 million smart speakers were sold in Russia, the market leader is Yandex, the top five are occupied by speakers from this company. And here the cost of such a solution comes to the fore, as it is bought for integration with a smart home, as an inexpensive device for entertaining a child. No matter how paradoxical it may sound, smart speakers are not about sound, in most cases this is exactly the case for the Russian market.

Sber enters Yandex territory for the first time,SberBox Time, which is already two years old, cannot be taken into account. Very interesting, but definitely niche device. The price was not prohibitive, but, given the possibility of connecting to TV, this was the main scenario, it was simply not perceived as a speaker. Yes, and the price looked high against the background of lightweight versions of columns from Yandex, which were offered at 5,000 rubles (the difference of three thousand in this segment plays a big role, even a thousand rubles is a lot).

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In 2023, SberBoom staked on the cost of 3,990 rubles. And this immediately brings the column to the first place, since, except for "VK Capsules Neo", all other products are noticeably more expensive.

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This product is targeted and aimed at children,here VK singled out this particular group and set a very competitive price plus added a small display. The product is interesting. Sberbank tried to make the dispenser universal, both for children and adults. They obviously focused on Yandex.Station Light, which is the leader in sales. By the way, Yandex reacted to the release of SberBoom Mini by lowering the price by a thousand rubles.

Curiously, most buyers in effecthabits do not perceive speakers from other companies as Alice's competitors in any way. It happened historically, plus other solutions are worse in terms of the assistant's work, additional features. But the way Sberbank is planning to promote itself aggressively, what they are doing in hardware, allows us to say that the competition will be very interesting and it will benefit everyone. Regardless of which column you choose, it will cost you less due to the wealth of choice. Let's take a look at the SberBoom Mini and what it can do.

Design, installation options, controls

The column is available in five colors, the names sound intricately: "Foggy White", "Neptune Blue", "Cloudless Blue", "Martian Red" and "Starry Yellow".

The column is large enough, at the bottom -slots for a speaker that works 360 degrees. The quality of the plastic is good, the charger has a long cable, but it is not removable. The downside is that the charging and cable are black, regardless of what color column you choose.

The column can not only be placed on a flat surface, but also hung on the wall, fastening is provided.

But with such an installation, it is worth remembering that youyou need an outlet nearby, so it's probably better to put the speaker on a table or somewhere on other furniture. In a room of 20 square meters, it does not matter where exactly it will stand, the microphones (there are two of them) pick up sounds well.

The internal structure of the column can be seen in the picture.

It is important to note that most competitorsfour microphones, there are two of them right there, and they are located on the upper end, where the buttons are. It seems that four is always better than two, in fact it all depends on the quality of the microphones and the sound processing algorithms used. Therefore, I didn’t notice much difference with small columns from Yandex (they stall quite often when the company’s servers are loaded, the last time it happened before the New Year). Plus, Sberbank used its advantage and trained the speaker to recognize different sounds that are used in the Noise Detector, this is a new feature, which we will discuss below.

The upper end is filled with keys, grouping with a classic cross.

Volume control (up, down), new"Wave" key, which starts playing music non-stop (requires a subscription to the "Sounds" service). In the center is a heart key (like it as it is), when you listen to music, you can thus mark what you liked. But, as before, this can be done in the application or by voice. The designers clearly wanted you to touch the column more often, to create this kind of binding.

A light indicator is built into the power button, it is not very bright, it illustrates well what is happening on the speaker. The lack of a display is not important for me, there are enough hours around.

Speaker volume - up to 5 W, the speaker is enoughloud, but if we talk about the quality of music playback, then you should not expect anything special. Budget option for fairy tales, podcasts, voice control. Of course, you can listen to music, but you will not get pleasure - exactly the same as with all speakers in this price segment. Although I met people who sincerely believed that such speakers produce good sound.

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Initial setup

You can add a column in the Salyut application, itavailable on both iOS and Android. When you turn it on for the first time, a column tells you exactly what you need to do. Plus, if the speaker suddenly loses its usual Wi-Fi, it can tell you how to reset all settings and set it up from scratch. The setup takes about ten minutes at most, the software is also automatically updated, you won’t have to wait long.

Noise detector

A new feature that appeared in columns fromSberbank for the first time in 2023. The idea is to use speaker microphones in order to track unusual sounds around. While this is a beta version and is supported on Android, they promise to add this feature to the iOS app later.

You can turn on the noise detector by voice command,from that moment on, the column does not know how to do anything except listen to the world around it. If you have physically turned off the microphones on the speaker, then this function will not work. Exactly the same command can disable the detector.

The developers have set up six types of noise thatmay be useful for recognition: broken glass, a crying child, a barking dog, the sound of water, a doorbell or alarm, clapping (a test sound that allows you to evaluate the operation of the detector). Plus, there is the “Any Sound” mode, in which the detector will record any noise that it hears. It's good to turn on this feature if your house is usually quiet, then you will know exactly what is happening.

I checked it for myself, the detector constantly listens to everything,what is happening around, and if an event has happened, then a push message arrives on your phone. During the day, almost three thousand events took place on my desktop, where the column stood! I was surprised to learn that some sounds on the computer were perceived as the sound of pouring water. But here it is important to understand that if you do not have a computer that constantly beeps, the detector will perfectly detect the sound of water. The question is, where and how do you use it, no one clearly thought that it was necessary to recognize third-party noises that looked like water. We trained the algorithm with a neural network, it is not perfect, but it does its job quite well.

In the message you are sent a record of the event, andit goes five seconds before the start of the sound so you can get the context. Recordings are not stored in the cloud, only locally on the column and on your device where they are transferred.

An alternative to the usual security systems is suchfunction cannot be, maximum as additional protection. It is probably possible to replace a baby monitor with such a column, but even here everything is very sparse. In a word, the noise detector is an additional thing, curious for the future, but by no means the main thing in the column.

Other smart speaker features - smart home control and more

If you have any of the devices from Sberbank withvoice assistant "Salute" (it is more correct to say that this is a family, and not just one assistant), then you can roughly imagine the capabilities of this column. She is somewhat simpler than Alice, she does not always understand the commands spoken outside the script, and only learns from them, gaining experience. For example, saying “turn off the noise detector” will not achieve anything, but changing the phrase to “turn off the noise detector” will get the desired result. There are a lot of such “little things”, they are gradually cleaned up, but here everything directly depends on the number of users of Sberbank voice assistants, the more there are, the faster they will start learning. I want to note that in the smart home control mode, the “turn off” and “turn off” commands are equivalent, so the problem here is rather in the new noise detector and that for some reason it does not perceive this command.

The advantage of an assistant from Sberbank is supportseveral teams at the same time, that is, in one phrase you can say: "Salute, turn on the light in the living room, turn on the music." The same Alice uses scripts for this, right there you can command your equipment without prior preparation.

The column supports the creation of a stereo pair, not hereno complications. But the possibilities of multiroom are more interesting, when all devices from Sberbank can simultaneously play what you are listening to on one of them. Now these are SberBoom, SberBoom Mini, SberPortal and SberBox Time. It is enough to say: "Salute, start the music everywhere."

Support for smart home is constantly expanding, at the moment there is compatibility with the following brands:

Aqara
Daichi Comfort (Daikin, Daichi, Kentatsu, Midea, Bosch)
DIGMA
EKF Connect
ELARI SmartHome
Eltex Home
HIPER IoT
Hommyn (Ballu, Electrolux)
iTEQ
Philips Hue
Polaris IQ Home
Roximo IoT
SLS
SmartHome Tricolor
Vixion Home
Yeelight
Yeelight Pro
ERA Smart

In my opinion, the most important for Russiais to support the Aqara brand, it is the most popular in our country. New brands are gradually appearing, but compared to Alice, the number of supported devices is much less, it is worth taking this into account. On the other hand, if you have chosen Aqara, then everything else becomes secondary and unnecessary. There are no problems with smart home control.

Search queries, questions to the assistant and utilitarian functions (set a timer, alarm clock, etc.) do not cause difficulties, everything works as usual.

Children's scripts and whispers

Competition is wonderful, and therefore in newcolumns from Sberbank, a whisper mode has appeared, you can ask something in a low voice, and the column will begin to whisper in response. Children's mode is enabled both in the application and on the column itself, in the second case, you will need to come up with a PIN code to turn it off.

In children's mode, content moderation is enabled,search queries and so on, which is logical. You can ask to tell a fairy tale, or you can turn on songs or play games. You can say: "Salute, I'm bored." The column will try to entertain the child in one way or another. It is the children's mode that will bribe many parents, it is useful and well designed.

Impression

With a column cost of 3,990 rubles, itbecomes a very interesting offer in terms of price / quality ratio. The market is undoubtedly dominated by Yandex.Station Light, but most of the time it is sold for a thousand rubles more, and this cannot be changed. Periodic discounts do not change the situation, they look like a marketing tool for additional sales, but they do not even account for 10% of the total number of speakers sold. Plus, the column from Sberbank may also receive discounts in the future, in a word, the competition will be desperate.

Sber's task with SberBoom Mini looks verysimple - to gain a foothold in the segment, give a mass device with good characteristics, and this column copes with it perfectly. It is impossible to wait for a total victory over Alice, but she is not needed. This is a slow blurring of the competitor's share, adding new features and working on the cost of the solution.

As part of his work, he was puzzled by the costof these solutions, Sberbank's approach is such that the price of their dispenser is more efficient (without taking into account the cost of development, I don't know it). And for Yandex, this means the impossibility of lowering the price below 3,500 rubles without losing money, although R&D is still worth considering here, the costs can be high - on the other hand, they are spread over all the columns.

In total, we have a good quality column, whichworth purchasing as a smart home control device, perhaps for the entertainment of children. As a competitor to Yandex.Station Light, it looks more than adequate and wins in cost, production efficiency and other parameters. It's a matter of getting used to the Salyut voice assistants, but this will come with time. For those who have never used such assistants, there can be no problem in principle.

Data security is a big issuewhen choosing a voice assistant, since such a column "listens" to everything that happens in your house. Of course, all companies claim to care about your privacy, but the history of Yandex shows that this is a series of leaks - both of the company itself and of user data. It is naive to expect such leaks to suddenly stop, as there will be more and more of them. And, perhaps, this is what should stop you from using Yandex columns if you care about your privacy. Unfortunately, most people don't think about it at all. Sberbank has never had such leaks.

From other points - the SberBoom Mini column is completelydoes not heat up, there is not even close to heating, as on SberBox Time. So those who worry about it can breathe. I plan to gradually replace Alice with these speakers.

The reason for this replacement is described above, for methe speaker is a voice interface for controlling a smart home, related services do not play a role, I don’t listen to music on it. Therefore, in my scenario, the replacement will occur painlessly. It is good that in Russia there is competition and the opportunity to choose different products, this is the main thing.

SberBoom - a review of a smart speaker with excellent sound

A large and smart speaker from Sberbank, which for the first time in Russia has a decent sound. Competitor "Yandex.Station 2" at a lower price. Great column.