Monster brings a music-centric voice assistant to its headphone line

Monster isn’t exactly regarded as the most innovative force in tech, but it has decided to get in on the voice assistant game by baking support for a helper called Melody directly into their headphones.

Speak Music, which makes the Melody voice assistant included on this model of Monster’s Elements headphones line, has basically designed the feature around Siri’s musical deficiencies in supporting services other than Apple Music, something it doesn’t even do that well to begin with. Speak Music’s chief revenue officer was VP of Product at Monster for a while so there seems to be some logic behind how this deal came to be.

Melody makes sense as an addendum to standalone audio products that don’t want to get trapped in the weeds of voice assistant dumbness by jumping on Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana platform. Theoretically, at least, through limiting expectations, you aren’t left disappointing customers by adding voice capabilities. For Bluetooth speakers, it could be great, for headphones that are already connected to your phone, it’s a much harder sell.

Melody can be downloaded onto your phone via app but voice assistants really need to be there at a moment’s notice so hardware integrations are a bit of must. The fact that a headphone maker would even have to include this showcases the sorry state of voice assistant support in 2017 and how the multitude of platforms out there are actually fracturing the limited utility they all offer in the first place.

Monster’s wireless Elements headphones, which come in “black slate,” “black platinum,” and “rose gold” are going on sale later this month for $350.