Any tech company worth its salt is doing them.
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Earlier this week Apple unveiled the aptly named HomePod, a speaker that stands seven inches tall.
Unsurprisingly, it also far outstripped an Amazon Echo for sound quality – but both that device and the Google Home are more geared towards AI than sound quality. Meanwhile, an A8 chip runs Siri and the HomePod.
Apple claims the HomePod promises to mix the smart features of the above speakers with great sound quality.
Apple takes a step beyond basic speaker hardware, though.
But Apple is late to the game on VR.
Smart speakers have powerful microphones that are always listening. Google recently launched Google Assistant for iPhone, which we put head-to-head with Siri.
Safari, Apple’s web browser, is getting new features aimed at online annoyances. But that is not the primary responsibility of the HomePod.
HomePod is created to work with an Apple Music subscription for access to over 40 million songs; it provides deep knowledge of personal music preferences and tastes and helps users discover new music.
Google Home, the smart speaker with Google Assistant built in, becomes officially available and supported in Canada on June 26, for $179. On both the Home and Alexa, music sounds awful. The mids sound muffled.
Apple is also wise to be leveraging its Music service, said Thomas Husson, another Forrester analyst. Even though we do expect that Siri would integrate with Apple’s HomeKit units and allow you to control everything by voice through the HomePod, we can’t be sure whether it will perform better than Amazon’s Alexa in different tasks.
Yet how well Apple differentiates its new product with others already widely available is questionable. It has a proper woofer.
With so many low-cost Bluetooth speakers already on the market, I think Apple might have a hard time carving out a niche.
The move is the first into a completely new area by Apple for more than two years as the world’s most valuable technology company looks to make up for a dip in iPhone sales and new ways to get customers to use more of its money-making apps and services. It is expensive for a speaker.
At WWDC, a range of updates to Siri were announced, including increased “machine learning” capabilities and a presence in more apps.
Samsung is testing a similar feature for its Android-powered phones. Siri can do everything you’d expect, like setting timers and playing music, but Siri is smarter now, especially where music is concerned. “They’re just using the existing iPhone platform for AR, so it’s a limited version of AR – a better version of Pokemon Go”.
On Monday, Apple introduced HomePod, its new smart speaker, at WWDC 2017. That’s not likely to be a dealbreaker for Apple fans, who will appreciate the fact that this is the only smart speaker to support Apple Music.
But in all likelihood none of this matters in the case of the HomePod, not right now.
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“Now the iPad is much more functional for a professional who’s used to using a file manager in their work”, Krewell added. One issue here is whether the HomePod will play nice with other music streaming services like Spotify.
