Report reaching us Friday has it that Amazon Echo’s competitor is about going to be coming from Apple in no distance future. Already, a prototype test is being conducted by Apple for smart home hub equipped to control appliances at home such as lights and others that can be found at home. They also intend to include the service of Siri which is its virtual personal assistant for voice commands.
When the product debuts, it will be the perfect competitor for Echo that at the moment is taking over home and biding to its owner’s voice command, serves as speaker for music, and can also put a call across to call on Uber, mark dates for meeting using online calendars as well as search for content online.
Apple intends to launch an even better speaker and microphone technology, giving an indication that it could as well include tools that can recognise faces. When Siri is added to the device, it will be able to read e-mails and also be able to send messages.
Echo by Amazon has since its launch in 2014 being very popular among the products that Amazon offers. It comes with a microphone that is inbuilt and can receive voice commands from across any section of the room, and it is wireless. The features of Echo have been upgraded making it possible for it to read books in audio form, and also give information on real-time traffic.
Apple has been seen looking in the waters of smart home industry in recent years. Their biggest move yet is the mobile operating system iOS 10 that goes by the name Home and is newly produced. The app is equipped with the ability to have connections with other smart home products especially with smart bulb lights like Philips Hue line. At a press briefing recently, the company said that we should expect many devices that will be included in the market to connect to Home in few months.
Before now, we could only find Apple’s smart home device on software alone. The latest downturn of iPhone and Mac lines and shareholders demanding that the company did something to keep them from falling over, the company has no choice than to expand.
Amazon is yet to reveal to us how much Echo has churned in for them even after admitting that users are quickly taking to the device. We take it that it is only when Apple is sure of the demand as well as the profit that such a device rakes in that it can venture it. The company has been known to have a habit of testing products and letting it stay at experimental stage without releasing them.
Bloomberg sources claims that Apple ventured into creating an alternative for Echo back in 2014 and has even gone to the extent of creating a prototype and tested it to show that is could be serious about it after all.
That does not mean that Apple cannot kill it if deems it unfit to appear as one of its products.
