This unique collaboration originated from talks between Raven and Teenage Engineering that started only 7 months ago.

Raven is a Chinese company, based in Beijing, focusing on making life easier, purer and more efficient with science, technology and design. Throughout the years Teenage Engineering has collaborated with only a selected number of companies, that all challenge the norm. Raven’s products and company culture was an ideal match.

This spring an intense exploratory development process started when a Teenage Engineering team travelled to Beijing with a trove of physical prototypes. The task was to design the future of artificial intelligent consumer products.

In just six short months, Teenage Engineering and the team at Raven have developed the ‘H’ from sketches to a finished product available today. We are very proud and grateful for the trust to design the new line of ‘all in ai’ products for Baidu (the dominating search engine in China, and world leader in ai technology) together with the Raven team.

In Silicon Valley they would call a device like the H a ‘smart speaker’. Our friends in Beijing, who asked us to collaborate on the H, rather talk about it in terms like ‘a colorful device for splendid moments’ and ‘flexible operations for life guidance’. We think that’s a quite humble way for them to talk about their world leading ai technology.

Raven calls the technology inside the H warm science, and we agree with that. With H you can easily acquire information in a quick way at home. Using the Baidu knowledge graph you can ask H to assist you with just about anything. So, say hello to H, your slatted life companion.

Teenage Engineering is looking into options to adopt H for the western world as we feel it’s an exceptionally interesting product.

Further, included in the original ideas was an expression that we all felt was too good to ignore, so yet another product was born – the ‘R’. The R is introduced at the Baidu world conference held in Beijing this week.

R is the worlds first emotional 6-axis life form. With unique possibilities to express emotions and react to a conversation driven by Baidu’s leading artificial intelligence technology. With six fully independent axes, loaded with sensors and microphones, and with the same loudspeaker design as the H built into the base, the industry grade motor control will make it dance and express feelings in a way you have never experienced before.

H and R share the same innovative, touch sensitive dot matrix display. The interface, the microphone and touch controls are simultaneously active and its integrated battery guarantees you free movement.

A Teenage Engineering team with a background in puppeteering and camera gimbals has with R created the first 6-axis life form with emotional expressions. The story of R will continue to develop in the coming months.