OFweek smart home network news According to Bloomberg News Beijing time on June 6th, as Apple's first heavyweight product in two years, HomePod smart speaker is so far Apple's use of Siri digital assistant, allowing users to interact with more and more products and services The best efforts.
At today's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple said that HomePod is a smart speaker based on the new Siri, and the new Siri can better understand music-related user requests.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said: "Apple is a company that attaches great importance to music content and hopes to bring the audio experience to the home. We feel like Apple had previously subverted portable players. In the same domain, Apple can now reshape the smart home market.†Cook and other Apple executives have demonstrated several new features of Siri on the spot, which fully demonstrates that the company is trying to catch up with similar products launched by Google and Amazon.
WWDC participants take pictures of HomePod smart speakers
According to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at market research firm Creative Strategie, “Obviously, Apple’s focus is on hardware, but it also makes Siri ubiquitous for users, so that you can See where the level of intelligence is constantly improving. At today's WWDC conference, Apple has always emphasized this point."
Amazon launched the Echo smart speaker in 2014, helping Alexa, the home appliance giant, to enter millions of homes, while Google Home became the voice portal for users to access their services. HomePod will also allow the iPhone's built-in Siri to go into more homes, turning it into an increasingly important hub for users to use Apple's other products and services.
Cooke said in an interview: "For us, the most important thing is not to be the first company to enter the market, but to be the best product, giving the user a wonderful experience, so that each time they use Pleasant feeling."
WWDC is Apple's annual event for software engineers. This group is constantly developing applications for Apple products such as iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. Many applications are sold through the App Store, and Apple gets sales from it. Cook’s goal is to double its revenue from service businesses (including iCloud and Apple Music) to about $50 billion by 2020.
The HomePod is priced at $349. The price is higher than the Amazon Echo ($230 for the Echo Show) and Google Home ($129). However, it is much cheaper than the iPhone. The new iPhone is currently priced at US$649 and is also the main tool for users to access Siri.
At this WWDC conference, Apple mainly called HomePod a kind of music device, and it is closely related to the company's Music streaming application. Each month Music users can give Apple 10 dollars in revenue. Users can also activate Siri Assistant through HomePod to control smart home products such as smart light bulbs.
The market research firm Strategy Analytics predicts that consumers' spending on smart home-related products and services will reach nearly 90 billion U.S. dollars this year and reach 155 billion U.S. dollars by 2022. In the three months to December 2016, Amazon dominated the global smart home market: 4.2 million smart speakers were sold worldwide, and Amazon Echo accounted for 88%.
Siri is still at the heart of Apple's machine learning strategy. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that helps software adapt to different data sources and automatically recognize images. Craig Federighi, Apple's software business executive, said: "We want to make powerful machine learning easier to use on the application." He announced a toolkit at the WWDC conference that allows developers to Use Apple's artificial intelligence technology.