The Amazon Echo is a pretty basic idea – a speaker for the home, with an voice-controlled AI assistant that can answer questions, add items to your shopping list or play music. The tech industry at large seems to have taken to the Echo – and Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant – and now we’re seeing other major firms work to get their own Echo alternative on the market. Google announced Home, its own speaker-cum-AI last week, and now a new report suggests that Apple is working on exactly the same thing. Here’s what we know so far.
The Information is reporting that Apple is building a Siri-powered speaker to the home, a perfect analogue of Amazon and Google’s products. Apple is also said to be opening Siri up to third-party developers for the first time; before now the voice assistant’s capabilities have been developed solely by Apple, although some third-party integration does exist.
The report suggests that the Home/Echo-style speaker is more of a long-term project, destined to arrive later this year or even in 2017. Opening up Siri to developers will come sooner, with an SDK – software development kit – already under construction. It could arrive as early as June, when Apple will be holding their yearly Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC.
That timeframe would suggest that this has been Apple’s plan for some time. The report additionally suggests some features for the platform, including the ability to control Homekit-attached appliances and integrate with third-party chat bots (another rapidly developing field, with recent examples announced by Google, Microsoft and Facebook, among others). These features should also come to Siri on the Mac, which is expected to be a tentpole feature in the upcoming MacOS 10.12 update.
What do you think of the news? Do you welcome our future AI overlords? Let us know in the comments.