Apple HomePod VS Amazon Echo: Which One Should You Buy

One of its key features will be its ability to play music on demand, making it direct competition to Sonos’ Wi-Fi-enabled speakers which are hugely popular. This is the quirk that Cupertino aims to fix with the release of HomePod, which is said to have adapted the best qualities of both and built upon the same.

Earlier this week Apple unveiled the aptly named HomePod, a speaker that stands seven inches tall. “This elegantly designed, compact speaker totally rocks the house”.

Maybe the heftier hardware inside the HomePod can explain the sky high price of the device, but it might still need a lot of improvements and additional software support to challenge Amazon head on. Our daily lives are constantly intruded upon by devices that no longer try to solve a problem, but, create them.

“In 2016, Apple announced 150 new intents, or commands, for Siri at its WWDC developers” conference-still far fewer than the 12,000 available with Amazon. Siri is definitely not as sophisticated as Alexa, which allows the user many more functionalities such as ordering a pizza from Dominos.

Siri, which has been included in Apple devices since 2014, was able to answer only 22% of questions and 62% of them correctly.

Compared to the audio quality of Apple’s new HomePod, the Amazon Echo is a significant mismatch. Google is still in the process of rolling it out to Android and adding extra capabilities, but it benefits from all the data its maker can collect on you, which means a more personalised experience (as well as more privacy worries). A market which although new, already has a leader in the Amazon Echo, and another newish product in Google Home.

People went from being happy and excited to sitting in workshops and realizing, ‘I can’t use it.’ Some went back to that attitude: Siri’s always going to be dumb. Six months is a lifetime in the world of devices, so will the HomePod actually look the same when it’s finally available to buy later this year? But Apple did not announce support for third party voice skills, like Amazon and Google offer with their smart speakers.

HomePod like all the other Apple devices send information to Apple’s server in encrypted form and with your unique Siri identifier that makes your personal information secure. It’s a speaker, and a powerful, high-performance one at that. Nothing wrong with that approach at all. For those concerned about security, Apple says all communications with the HomePod will be encrypted. Plus, with the fact that both Amazon and Google got their devices out much sooner, at a much more affordable price point, unless something special that was not revealed at WWDC comes to light, HomePod might end up being a major flop.