Apple turns up speakers, AR

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Apple announced a $349, Siri-powered speaker, leveraging its expertise in music against rivals Amazon and Google. It also rolled out developer’s kits for augmented reality and machine learning on iOS 11 and upgraded its Macintosh and iPad computers.

The HomePod is a 6.8-inch speaker driven by an Apple A8 SoC to handle echo cancellation and optimize sound for a given space. It packs a four-inch woofer and an array of seven tweeters, each with its own driver to deliver better sound than smart speakers such as Alexa and Google Home.

“This is really going after Sonos and Bose home speakers--the audio is superior to Sonos--music is in Apple’s DNA,” said Tim Bajarin, president of market watcher Creative Strategies (Campbell, Calif.). “It’s not designed like Amazon’s Alexa as a front end to online stores…my gut says they will sell millions of these as a powerful home speaker,” he added.

Nevertheless, HomePod sports a six-mic array to respond to natural language commands, putting a toe in the water of the smart-speaker market Amazon dominates. HomePod does not enable the range of some 12,000 tasks of Alexa or the range of queries Google supports. Initially, HomePod is prepped for a short list of topics that include music, traffic, weather, stock quotes, unit conversions and translating between a small set of language pairs.

This article was originally published on EE Times. To read the rest of the article, please click here.