Amazon Sees Apple's Siri Talking With Alexa Virtual Assistant, Report Says

Apple's also expected to unveil a voice-activated, internet-connected speaker to rival Amazon's Echo and Google Home.

For one thing, Amazon's intention is to make its Echo devices cheap enough that people can put them all over their house, Limp said.

The HomePod will use its internal microphones to pick up voice commands and uses the same processor chip as the iPhone to pump out "spatially aware" sound, Apple said. Amazon sells the main version of the Echo for $180; Google's Home speaker goes for $130.

Apple's music-first sales pitch may explain why Apple is pricing this device much higher than comparable home-assistant devices from Google and Amazon, which are not advertised as high-fidelity music devices. HomePod, infused with machine smarts by Siri digital assistant, will be priced at $349 when it begins shipping in December in the United States, Australia and Britain. Siri® can also handle advanced searches within the music library, so users can ask questions like "Hey Siri, who's the drummer in this?" or create a shared Up Next queue with everyone in the home.

Amazon has also added the iCloud Calendar support to the Echo speaker. The research firm eMarketer says than 35 million people in the US are expected to use a voice-activated speaker at least once a month this year, more than double its estimate from last year.

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.

The HomePod speaker is photographed in a a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday in San Jose, Calif. "We want to reinvent home music", Apple CEO Tim Cook said before Phil Schiller, the company's Vice President of Marketing, pointed out the HomePod's unique position in the current market landscape.

The HomePod is Apple's first new gadget in almost three years, following its announcement of the Apple Watch in September 2014.

Apple Music will offer additional playlists, including those based on tunes to which friends are listening.

The speaker can detect the length, breadth and other environmental things, and automatically adjust the sound quality and volume levels according to that environment. It's just that Apple believes it can make them better. A larger problem for HomePod is also one of its headlining features: Siri.

Ditching your phone for always-on smart home control is great, but not unheard of. At WWDC, Apple announced the speaker category for HomeKit, so other speaker makers could more tightly integrate with iOS.

Once you have the Echo in your kitchen or living room, buying stuff on Amazon becomes so stupidly easy that even a kindergartner can do it. Not only does the speaker use Apple's old, 30-pin iPod charger, but it's so old that the connector only supports Firewire charging, instead of the later generations of iPods, which used a similar physical adapter but used USB.

There's going to be plenty of buzz for Apple's shiny new plaything, but let's not assume that it's going to be the class act of Cupertino's next needle-moving innovation.

The real challenge for Apple and other major tech companies moving forward is that numerous enhancements and capabilities they're going to introduce over the next several years are likely to be a lot subtler refinements of existing products or services.

"The price tag is notably higher than both Amazon and Google's smart home offerings", he pointed out, "and while it will no doubt appeal to Apple fans, there is little to suggest - at least from the initial details - that this will directly compete against those Echo and Home devices". It's basically what the Echo does best, and Amazon's head start means it already has a foothold in the home automation market, however nascent it may be.

No one was expecting Apple to price its hardware aggressively.