Apparently Apple knows Siri kinda sucks, because it was the last thing mentioned in the unveiling of the new HomePod[1] speaker. That’s why it’s dumpily named as a successor to the iPod, not Apple’s old-but-unwise voice assistant.
The $349 HomePod wifi speaker has 7 beam-forming tweeters, a custom subwoofer, multi-channel echo cancelling, and acoustic modeling in an Apple-y little futuristic shell, trumpeted VP Phil Schiller. Only after gabbing on and on about its sound quality and elegance did he throw up a final slide of the limited range of non-music voice assistance HomePod can provide.
Going head-to-head with Google Home’s speech recognition or Amazon Echo’s voice command developer ecosystem could have been disastrous. It’s frustrating yet permissible when Siri stumbles on your phone where you can easily default to your thumbs. But on a screenless speaker like HomePod, if Siri sucks, the whole gadget does too.
So rather than let you try and fail to ask HomePod anything, Apple focused on making it somewhat competent at a few categories of questions. At least it can transcribe and send messages, do basic translation, read you news, and control your IOT devices. And it’s got music covered, letting you request similar songs, get production details, and discover music by genre or date.
Apple says it will unlock more HomePod Siri functionality eventually, making use of the six internal microphones. And to court the privacy buffs, it only listens and sends anonymized, encrypted data back to Apple after you’ve said “Hey Siri” rather than constantly eavesdropping.
But really, this is Apple’s admission that it needed to kick the voice command can down the road a bit and strengthen Siri but it goes gunning for Google and Amazon. In the short-term, it can focus on...
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