Yes, Sonos speakers will start working with Amazon Alexa later this year, but Apple has characteristically blended the two ideas - high-end speaker with voice control - in the HomePod.
Apple on Monday introduced a music speaker, its first hardware since Apple Watch was rolled out two years ago, at this year's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Here are the highlights: --- SIRI-POWERED SPEAKER An internet-connected speaker called HomePod is coming in December for about $350.
To be available on the market in December this year, the compact wireless speaker has some identical functions offered by similar products made by other companies, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, but promises to produce higher quality sound. Eventually, Apple will introduce more services to the HomePod including the technology to send messages to other devices. "It will reinvent home audio", Cook said.
Speaking to 5,300 attendees who are mostly app developers at the mega hall of McEnery Convention Center, the head honcho of Apple gave an introduction and brief insight on all the new announcements, followed by detailed presentations by respective product heads.
It's impossible to miss one of Apple's biggest ambitions for the HomePod: control over your home, and a central placement within it. What even more exciting is the fact, that each of the seven speakers has its own driver and uses a beamforming system.
But that's just the beginning of what you can do with Apple's smart speaker.
Created to work with an Apple Music subscription for access to over 40 million songs, Apple claims that HomePod provides knowledge of personal music preferences and tastes and helps users discover new music.
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Apple A8 chip lies at the heart of the latest smart home speaker. The smart assistant has been selling well ever since and has inspired a host of lookalikes and copies, most notably, the Google Home.Moving forward, Siri intelligence will automatically display information that is relevant to you on the face of the watch using advanced machine learning technologies that improve and "learn" over time.
But it's also possible that the HomePod could expose Siri as less capable than Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana, Blaber said. Apple said HomePod can separate vocals and other parts of the music via Apple Music, but that more recent recordings will perform the separation better. Apple wowed developers with a new platform to make augmented reality apps, as well.
Cook also announced the most powerful Mac to date, the iMac Pro.
A set of iOS 11 features including enabling smartphone cameras to read QR codes are aimed at the China market, where Apple would like to bolster iPhone sales.
Google recently announced that its Chrome Web browser will block specific ad types by default, including auto-playing video ads.
The free software update for mobile devices, iOS 11, is expected in September, when Apple typically releases new iPhones.
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