The Echo, released in 2015, and Google Home, released previous year, were the first entrants in a promising market.
HomePod, the Siri-infused speaker Apple announced earlier this week at WWDC, is the svelte love child of a Sonos speaker and Amazon Echo, though Apple is leaning a bit harder in the first direction than the latter.
Or have we? With the almost three years old and the now available in the U.S. and the United Kingdom as well, Apple has some stiff competition in the smart speaker space.
The arrival of the HomePod also brings a second fixed smart home hub device into the lineup. This is very similar to Sonos' Trueplay feature, which similarly tunes its speakers to any room. Compared to the Google Assistant that powers the Google Home and the Alexa, which is inside Amazon's speaker, Siri is pathetic, especially in India where it can't even properly recognise what a person is saying because of the accent.
Available in white or "space grey", the device has seven tweeters, a four-inch woofer, and will work with Apple Music, the company's streaming music service.
Data for the Google Home is encrypted in transit and at rest, which means that it's protected as it heads to Google's servers and encoded again where it's stored. Here we pit the three devices against each other in all the key categories.
In a statement, Apple said the HomePod is "a breakthrough wireless speaker for the home that delivers awesome audio quality and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio". It has a wide range of talents, and usually recognises what you're trying to say well enough. All of this is controlled by Apple's custom-made A8 chip. It would seem some of us can anticipate our parents making any number of awful home related puns when they go to flip on their new holiday playlist next time they are over for a family game night. The Mac Pro-resembling home speaker did trigger a lot of social media reactions - some outright hilarious. Meanwhile, Apple TV and Google Chromecast have both been conspicuously left out of Amazon's online retail market.
Alabama ex-con accused of killing Florida girl
Morgan says Howard "frequented" the Aspen Village apartment of his girlfriend, which is "very near" the Jones family's apartment. Morgan said he won't comment on the possible sexual nature of the attack, nor if the girl put up a fight before she was killed.
Apple TVand its tvOS didn't take the spotlight in Apple's recent WWDC keynote presentation - and, perhaps, that's for the best, because it would be hard to compete with the rest of the day's news. This is the only big announcement by Apple since the launch of its Apple Watch sometime back in September 2014.
The new HomePod works smoothly with your Apple Music subscriptions and it gives you an instant access to over 40 million individual songs.
Alexa and Siri, rival voice assistants on Amazon's Echo and Apple's iPhone, don't directly communicate with one another.
Amazon sells Echo devices for US$179, and smaller "Dot" versions for US$50.
Apple has given Siri new male and female voices, described as more natural and expressive, and added abilities such as translating English phrases into Chinese, French, German, Italian or Spanish. It remains to be seen how the market responds to the HomePod after it hits the US shelves in December. While he didn't discuss exactly how the devices differ, he told USA Today that the HomePod's $349 price tag makes it substantially more expensive than his company's alternatives, including the popular Amazon Echo.
John Lewis has some of the best prices for Apple TV in the United Kingdom; it also has great delivery and returns options. Apple is just getting started, and it will be a while before there's a robust suite of functionalities outside of what Siri is able to do right now. One issue here is whether the HomePod will play nice with other music streaming services like Spotify.
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