Prizm, a new entry in the WiFi speaker field, has successfully completed its Kickstarter fundraising. The device streams music from the cloud, pulling tracks from Deezer and Spotify premium accounts and from free SoundCloud accounts. The team is working on adding support for Rhapsody, Last.fm, and Rdio.
The angle setting Prizm apart from other speakers is the intuition and personal knowledge it promises. The “learning music player” learns about your tastes over time: which the genres you prefer on waking up versus when you get home from work, or when you want to discover new songs versus hear existing playlists. It applies this knowledge to you and any other people who frequent your home. Plus, touching the heart button on the speaker will add the current track to a playlist on your favorite of those connected apps.
The device reads the WiFi or Bluetooth signals from your smartphone or wearables to assess what’s happening in the room. It claims to know whether it’s you or your roommate sitting on the couch and will play music tailored to that person. The device also measures the ambient noise of a room, and it adjusts song choices accordingly, so you’ll get a different mood set when the whole family comes over for dinner than you will when spending a quiet night in with a book.
Many playlist-centric streaming services place a similar focus on creating a feel to match a particular moment. Combining that idea with home technology and better audio quality than earbuds seems like a natural next step for music lovers. Prizm is currently expected to ship to Kickstarter backers in June 2015. We’re curious to see how the tech develops.