Don't call Cone a speaker. It's a "thinking music player."

That, anyway, is how Duncan Lamb, co-founder of Aether, explains his company's new offering, a conical music-machine that learns your tastes and seamlessly streams the songs you want to hear. It's a fairly radical reinvention of a familiar gadget–a speaker that relieves you of the responsibility of DJing every song at every step of the way. But it's also an example of how the internet of things is quickly maturing, proving that clever algorithms and beefy processing power can be combined to make products simpler to use, rather than more complex.

Take a close look at how you listen to music today, and you'll find that complexity clogging things up at every stage. For all the on-demand ease of subscription services like Spotify and Rdio, you still have to figure out what to listen to. Then you have to account for other sources, like internet radio and podcasts. At some point, you have to figure out how you're actually going to listen to this stuff in your house. Is it synced to your phone? Is it on your PC? Will the device it's playing on stream to your living room speakers?

>Cone boils the complex workflow of streaming music down to a single interaction.

Cone takes all that complexity and hides it inside a single, simple piece of hardware. The speaker itself isn't covered in buttons, nor does it bear a touchscreen. Built into the hardware, though, are a number of clever controls. To play a song, press the button in the center of the speaker grill; Cone will choose a song from your streaming music service of choice. To hear something different, you just spin the front edge of the speaker. This sends you to another genre, or else switches to another input source entirely, like an internet radio station or a favorite podcast. In essence, Cone boils the complex workflow of streaming music at home down to a single interaction: turning a big, satisfying dial.

Of course, sometimes you do know precisely what you want to hear. In those cases, you can press the central button and just shout out the name of a track or an artist. Or, if you've got your phone in your hand, you can search for a song from the Cone app, or just beam music to it through your phone's stock music app, like you would any AirPlay speaker.

>Aether's stance is that truly smart devices need simple, powerful controls.

Replacing Buttons With Better Context Recognition ————————————————–

Of course, one of the ideas behind Cone is that, when we're at home, we don't always have our phones in our hands. And yet, Lamb and company didn't want to risk making Cone needlessly complex; one of the motivating beliefs behind Aether is that truly smart devices need simple, powerful controls specific to those devices themselves.

The secret sauce that lets Aether achieve that simplicity is machine learning. Each time you spin its dial, Cone learns something about you. By taking note of what you skip past and what you listen to, it slowly puts together a profile of your music listening habits. It'll take note of what you turn up to rock out to–and what time of day you do it. With a built-in accelerometer, it knows when you pick the thing up and take it to another room, and it will pay attention to what you listen to there (and how it's different what you listened to in the first room.)

If you're not going to bedeck every gizmo with a touchscreen or off-load its controls to a dedicated application, you need to "pick up the slack with services and sensibility," explains Lamb, who formerly served as a product designer at companies like Nokia and Skype. Another way of putting it is that you have to make the few controls you do have smarter. With Cone, that spin that tells it to move to the next track isn't always the same static command. Instead, it changes based on what day you're listening and what time. In other words, Cone's sensitivity to context is what lets it get away with being so simple.

Making Choices for You ———————-

The even bigger–and bolder–idea behind Cone is that we don't always know what we want to listen to in the first place. It's an insight that was born out of months of research, with Aether's early employees examining their own music listening habits and those of a dozen families with various levels of tech and music literacy. The problem, in short: Services like Spotify give us a staggering library of songs but offer relatively primitive tools for enjoying them. "Streaming music is still finding its place in the world," Lamb says. "It's accessible. But it's not really accessible."

Today's streaming services, he continues, are "designed by people who love music for people who love music." It's tempting to think that's everyone, but in the real world, it's evident that it's not. Most of the time, Lamb says, what people are looking for isn't the perfect song so much as a good one for the moment. It's why we like flipping on the radio when we get in the car or switching on Pandora when we're having people over for dinner. From a certain perspective, you could even say that Cone's out to redefine the experience of enjoying music altogether. No longer do you have to figure out what you want to listen to. You just tell this speaker that you want to listen to something, and it will take care of the rest.

At $399, there's no certainty Cone will find footing in what's already a crowded category when it arrives later this summer. That is, a crowded category if you're looking at it as another wireless speaker. If you look at it as a speaker that uses machine learning to make sure your house is always filled with music you're enjoying, that category's a new one altogether.