Apple today announced plans to release a smart speaker named HomePod later this year to compete with Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other smart speakers.
The device will be available in white and space grey and retail for $ 349. HomePod will also be spatially aware to improve music quality.
The HomePod will first be available in December to customers in the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia. Manufacturing of smart speakers with Siri inside reportedly already started in Taiwan, Bloomberg reported last month.
The news was announced Monday at WWDC, the Apple annual developer conference being held June 5-9 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, Calif.
With Siri, HomePod will be able to help people talk about and discover music.
Though intelligent assistants are now able to do a range of tasks, music is still one of the most important parts of the experience. A VoiceLabs survey of smart speaker owners found that more than 40 percent of activity with the AI-powered devices is still related to playing music or books.
Over the course of the past year of booming interest in bots an artificial intelligence, Siri has largely been overshadowed by competitors like Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant, each of whom have opened their assistants to third-party developers.
In recent weeks Amazon and Google gained the ability or announced plans to launch call and messaging services, and with the launch of Lens for Google and Echo Look, in recent weeks both companies have taken steps to introduce computer vision.
Voiced by actress Susan Bennett, the Siri intelligent assistant first made its debut in 2011. While Siri is one of the first modern voice assistants, its one of the last of the tech giants to release a smart speaker, following Amazon Echo in 2015 and Google Home last year.
Apple certainly has some catching up to do: An eMarketer forecast last month predicted that Amazon is expected to demand roughly 70 percent of the smart speaker market share this year, with Google Home taking much of the rest of the market.
Siri has been able to add events to calendar or answer random questions for a long time, but at WWDC last year, Apple announced plans to open Siri up to interact with apps, a feature that first became available last September with the launch of iOS 10. Since then, Siri has been able to do things like send WhatsApp messages and search for LinkedIn Learning courses with voice alone. iMessage apps and the iMessage App Store also debuted with iOS 10.
Siri’s limited approach to app integrations runs counter to that taken by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, who have invited developers to create their own third-party voice apps.
While other tech giants have opened their products to a range of third-party voice apps and new features, Apple initially chose to limit Siri’s functionality when working with third-party software. Today there are more than 13,000 Alexa skills, hundreds of Google Assistant actions, but only a handful of apps have integrated with Siri.
