For instance, in the voice-enabled speakers market: Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot retails for $179.99 and $49.99 a piece and Google Home retails for $129.99.
Advertisement
Like the Echo and Home, Apple’s HomePod not only plays music with a voice command, but can also answer users’ questions and provide information like news, weather updates and sports scores. The HomePod is not expected to ship until December 2017, and it will cost $349, that is almost twice as the Echo ($179) and Google Home ($129) and is expensive.
When Apple announced a smart speaker at its annual developer conference on Monday, the news was met with little surprise.
“If Apple or Google want to come calling, my phone number is out there, they can call.I don’t know if I can envision it but I hope that will happen on behalf of customers”, Limp told a group of journalists at the Wired Business Conference Wednesday in NY. Much like with Siri, Apple is just simply doing less than its competitors here. When away from home, the HomePod is the flawless home hub, providing remote access and home automations through the Home app on the iPhone or iPad.
It will be interesting to see how Apple Siri develops now that HomePod is set to launch.
Apple’s HomePod speaker is a depth charge dropped into the ocean where Google Home and Amazon Echo sail. Like Salakhutdinov, who divides his time between Carnegie Mellon and Apple, Hinton divides his time between Google and the University of Toronto. But Amazon dropped in, seemingly out of nowhere, with a voice-based virtual assistant that won the early fight of the voice assistant war.
One major sticking point for consumers may be the HomePod’s $350 price tag, which makes it twice as expensive as Amazon’s Echo. But multiple factors, including internal reshuffles and talent departures, an apparent lack of vision clarity, but also the success of the iPhone and the increased focus on user privacy are factors that “helped” Apple fall behind with Siri. Salakhutdinov said he was not authorized to discuss his work at Apple in any detail.
This mostly means that your data is unlikely to be stolen or spied on as it’s being sent to Apple’s, Google’s or Amazon’s servers. Siri can do the usual smart assistant tasks, but the device’s music commands are designed specifically to work with a $10 monthly Apple Music subscription. The speakers are powered by smart assistants like Siri and Alexa that talk back.
After Google Chrome came along and stole web browser dominance from Microsoft and others, Apple is in an endless game of catch-up to keep internet users in its ecosystem.
It’s very much the Apple version of a smart home speaker that you imagined. For the record, the others support Spotify, Pandora, and other popular music streams. That’s closer to a thousand dollars than it is to zero dollars, so I hope you love listening to tunes. Though not ideal, he says Alexa is better at identifying when the Alexa wake word is coming from a television rather than someone in your house who really does want to ask the speaker something.
Without any unexpected delays, the HomePod will hit the market by December. Apple wants to deliver its smart assistant to your home, but it doesn’t really want to make a big show of it.
Given the publishing and design markets are still Apple heartlands the introduction of products that would slot into a corporate environment should be welcomed by the channel according to analysts.
Advertisement
More than likely, we’re seeing another installment of “Sell in May” syndrome.
