Some of the key features that will appeal to the home user are its ability to throw music recommendations based on Apple’s Music service, text messaging, checking the news and sports scores etc.
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Siri cofounders Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus left the team and formed Viv Labs which was acquired by Samsung not too long ago.
There are three things that Apple touts with the HomePod’s arrival: Siri, music and smart home control. First, it has been created to track spacial awareness and detects the size of the room you are in and adjusts its output accordingly. That has caused many to speculate that the company will announce new functions before its release.
Text written by hand with the Apple Pencil will be searchable, using machine learning for the user’s handwriting.
Amazon and Google are early movers in this market. So while Apple claims that the sound quality will be much better than its competitors, for the same price as one HomePod, you could purchase a 3 or 5-speaker Sonos surround sound system. “Dot and Echo through Bluetooth and Audio Out can connect to other speakers”.
The third combatant in this fracas will be the Amazon Echo. The Journal said two other Siri employees landed at Google and Amazon. Apple’s HomeKit platform is the easiest option for someone who wants to start tinkering with smart home tech, and a smart speaker expands that ease of use – but only so far as it can actually get into the spaces people live.
As a home assistant, HomePod is a great way to send messages, get updates on news, sports and weather, or control smart home devices by simply asking Siri to turn on the lights, close the shades or activate a scene.
Imagine instead that as you walk into a room you could say “Hello room!” BI Intelligence recently found that only about 10 percent of homes are using smart home tech right now, with more and more expected to join in the coming years. Plus, Alexa has the disadvantage of not being able to collect information about you from either Android or iOS.
Apple played up the rich speaker quality of HomePod, and synched it with the company’s music service that boasts 27 million subscribers. Not only has Echo been out for a while, Amazon has four different versions now, including one with a camera and one with a monitor.
Speaking to former Apple employees and developers The Wall Street Journal learned a part of Siri’s inside story. The product is an initiative by Apple to expand into the $50 billion wireless smart speaker industry.
Amazon and Google both have policies for dealing with demands for data on the Echo and the Home.
Apple’s HomePod which was the big announcement at WWDC 2017, is a product which everyone is talking about. The Echo can support multiple users as well, but you need to manually switch accounts by name, at least for now – the speaker can’t identify people from their voices.
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At $349, the HomePod is marketed as a high end speaker with Siri built-in that is in-between Sonos and the Echo/Google Home. “There’s a high chance they will fall short on smartness compared to Google Assistant and Alexa”. Google is making huge strides forward in AI and natural language understanding, and of course knows more about you than Apple or Amazon, which helps with personalisation.
