Apple debuts HomePod speaker to bring Siri into the living room

Shares of Apple (AAPL) are down 23 cents at $153.70 in pre-market trading, as the Street mulls yesterday’s barrage of announcements from the company at its annual developer conference, which in this case included the unveiling of a competing intelligent assistant, of sorts, to Amazon’s (AMZN) Echo, called the “HomePod“.

It’s now unclear at what point this year the service will be made Apple TV compatible. Like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, the HomePod will play music while also helping people to manage their lives and homes. Either way, we won’t know for sure until the HomePod launches in December.

Of HomePod, he writes, “the high-fidelity acoustics present cross selling opportunities with Apple Music”.

Unlike Google and Facebook, which spoke frequently about their efforts and made their tools freely available for developers to use, Apple was notoriously secretive.

Displaying a Sonos product to show speakers that were, in Cook’s words, “speakers but not smart”, and an Amazon Echo to show something that was “smart, but not a speaker”, HomePod is meant to be both. It was one of the first times that Apple had spoken at length about how the company was using machine learning in its products – and for good reason.

The technology, a feature of the wildly successfully smartphone game Pokemon Go, overlays digital information on real-world images and is seen as an area in which the keenly awaited 10th-anniversary iPhone can stand out from competitors. Or maybe it’s because Apple wants to capitalize on a different part of the market.

The new iPads will be available from next week, and include a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera as well as a 7-megapixel camera at the front of the device. Similarly, while AI and machine learning sound like exotic, exciting technological breakthroughs, their real-world benefits should actually be subtle, but practical extensions to things like contextual intelligence, which is a hard message to deliver.

The logic of linking Apple TV, a device for watching television over the Internet, with Amazon.com Inc’s booming video-streaming service looks obvious. The new 10.5-inch model offers room for a full-size keyboard, something the 9.7 inch model couldn’t. The traditional Apple move is to play up ease of use – the ability for pairs of speakers to work together and the ease of pairing an iPhone to the speakers. The company also exposed a new iMac Pro, as well as upgraded iMacs and MacBook’s. Apple approaches voice interaction problems programmatically – Siri needs to be able to do X, so here are the ways you can tell it to do X. Google (and to a lesser extent Amazon) created a platform that actually understands context with machine learning. It will block videos that start playing automatically, for instance, and can also prevent ads from following and profiling users.

It also enhanced its workout app to, for instance, support high intensity interval training.

Based on what you read in Apple News, words you type into messages or content you search for in the Safari web browser, Siri will make suggestions in other apps. It will also be possible to exchange data between gym equipment and the watch.