Amazon's Echo and Google's Home smart speakers now have new, serious, competition.
Apple has unveiled a new smart speaker, called the HomePod.
Just like we did with portable music, we want to reinvent home music
Tim Cook, CEO, AppleIt comes in white and space grey, is under 7-inch tall, comes packed with 7 tweeters, precision acoustic horns and a 4-inch upward-facing woofer.
It runs on a Apple A8 chip, the same as the latest iPhone. It does real-time acoustic modeling, audio beam-forming, multi-channel echo cancellation and automatically detects the size of your room.
With six in-built microphone you can beckon Siri to play your favourite songs on Apple Music. It also acts as a home assistant, give you news and sports updates, monitor stocks, get traffic updates, set reminders, and messages, set timers and make general queries.
Priced at $349. Global launch by next year.