Siri sets up in the home

SOON homes in the kingdom may be echoing to the sounds of ‘Hey Siri’ if tech giant Apple gets its way following the unveiling of its latest consumer product.

The HomePod is described as a ‘breakthrough wireless speaker for the home’ that delivers ‘amazing audio quality’ and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the sound.

“Apple reinvented portable music with iPod and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes,” claimed Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

“HomePod packs powerful speaker technology, Siri intelligence and wireless access to the entire Apple Music library into a beautiful speaker that is less than seven-inches tall, can rock almost any room with distortion free music and be a helpful assistant around your home.”

Designed to work with an Apple Music subscription for access to more than 40 million songs, the device promises to provide ‘deep knowledge of personal music preferences and tastes’ and help users discover new music.

HomePod features a large, Apple-designed woofer for deep, clean bass, a custom array of seven beam-forming tweeters that provide high frequency acoustics with directional control and technologies built right in to preserve the richness and intent of original recordings.

It should be available for the Christmas rush, costing around BD130, initially in Australia, the UK and the US.

l HomePod is designed for voice control with an array of six microphones, so users can interact with it from across the room, even while loud music is playing. By saying, ‘Hey Siri, I like this song’, HomePod and Apple Music become ‘the perfect musicologist’, learning preferences from hundreds of genres and moods.

l Siri will 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.

As a home assistant, HomePod will offer a way to send messages, get updates on news, sports and weather, or control smart home devices by simply asking Siri to turn on the lights, close the shades or activate a scene.

When away from home, HomePod will provide remote access and home automations through the Home app on an iPhone or iPad.

Whether through entertainment or home assistant, Apple needs to make sure its HomePod heads off the challenge from Amazon’s Echo and Google’s rival Home speaker, analysts say.

If an iPhone owner buys a rival’s device, they may be more tempted to switch to another smartphone maker such as Samsung or Google.  “Apple can’t afford to yield valuable real estate in the heart of people’s homes to Amazon, Google and others as access to content, information and search becomes pervasive and less dependent on the smartphone,” said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.

“As the iPhone reaches a point of near-saturation in mature markets and replacement rates continue to slow, Apple must find new ways to lock in users.”