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Apple Is Manufacturing a Siri Speaker

73 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

Yhippa 9y ago
Normally I would count this as an auto-win for Apple but the interesting thing about these speakers isn't necessarily the hardware itself but the many services that back them. I play with both Home and Echo a lot and I'm most impressed by how quickly Google is adding lots of useful functionality. Their documentation and evangelism for developing on their platform seems to be pretty good too. I think Apple will catch up quickly as they did with the Watch.
- stdgy 9y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, Siri is on death watch until Apple figures out a strategy to open it up. Outside of setting timers, creating reminders, setting alarms, doing a little dictating or mishearing directions, the product is stagnant. I just don't see a lot of utility going forward unless they liberalize the service and allow other people to develop new experiences for users. That should also give them new data to mine and allow good voice UI patterns to bubble up. Not sure how they should go about designing a framework for developers to plug-in to, though. It's a tricky problem. But presumably they've learned some things after 'sharing' some of Siri with Uber and Facebook and that could help them move forward.
  - eridius 9y ago
    Apple already opened up Siri. Third-party app developers can now add their own Siri integration (though I don't know how extensive this is, having never looked into the details myself). But it seems like not very many third-party developers are actually bothering to do so.
    - dep_b 9y ago
      There's just a few things you can do. Call someone, send a message, hail a cab, ask for directions, stuff like that. Six scenarios in total. You could try to WhatsApp someone with Siri, probably that'll work. Though I hate using voice commands I never tried it.
  - dkrich 9y ago
    I think that Apple has bet (correctly) that voice is a feature not a platform and that great hardware will make people buy into its services. Voice is great for a few things but very lousy for most things. Obviously it's all conjecture at this point, but my guess is that this product will augment the use of its devices for the things that voice is superior to GUI for (playing music and basic queries). Since Apple typically blows the competition out of the water with design and marketing, I imagine that this will do pretty well in this space (just imagine walking into an Apple store and seeing an IKEA-like display with a sleek home theatre and its speaker system on display). I do think that the walled-garden is concerning since you can't use it with all music services, for example, but on the other hand, if its a premium speaker system that might be enough to push me the other way and switch to Apple music. The question is is the product compelling enough to get people to buy into the platform.
    - darawk 9y ago
      Apple's prowess is in designing physically attractive objects, and easy to use UI. Voice has very little UI, and it has even less use for physical appearance. That's not to say that how these things look isn't important. It is. But it's nowhere near as important as it was with a phone.
      - dkrich 9y ago
        My argument is that voice isn't all that useful in general and that if Apple creates a much higher quality product than Echo, for example, that people will want it because it's a very nice speaker that looks really cool and can play music, give the weather, and set a timer by voice, which covers the majority of use cases. In other words, a voice platform that works 10x better than another may only be slightly more useful to the average consumer while if the actual speaker is 10x better, it might be 10x more compelling.
        darawk 9y ago
        Ah, ya. Then I agree with you there.
    - 9y ago
  - rajathagasthya 9y ago
    I'd really love if Apple integrated the Workflow app they acquired into Siri. I think it could be a straightforward way to let Siri do more useful things than just setting reminders and asking about the weather. They also have improve the voice recognition big time since Siri has real difficulties understanding if you have an accent.
dkonofalski 9y ago
Oh great... another self-driving car project... /s To me, this just feels like another jump on the bandwagon. I have an Echo and, while it was awesome at first, with all the skills and everything it feels less amazing than it did when I first got it. Now, I feel like it mishears us all the time, it doesn't give the answers we'd normally get unless we say things in a very specific way, and all the cool tricks ("Who is the mother of dragons?") are just gimmicks now. Unless Apple can actually make their version useful and able to understand questions that aren't formed in "robot" as the language, I don't see the point of this.
- Yhippa 9y ago
  I've found the Home useful. All I can use the Echo for is to set multiple simultaneous kitchen timers and to play music while cooking. The Echo just doesn't seem to be able to handle natural language well or there isn't support for what I'm asking.
  - Macsenour 9y ago
    I use my Alexa also for listening to Baseball which, correct me if I'm wrong Internet, Home can't do.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      I have no idea where one would listen to baseball, but Home has the ability to play radio stations at least through TuneIn and iHeartRadio: https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7071793?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7071793?hl=en One of the examples is playing ESPN Radio.
  - CobrastanJorji 9y ago
    Multiple kitchen timers is by far the most common use case I have for my Home. Not coincidentally, it's also my #1 complaint. Google, when a timer goes off, please please just tell me the name of the timer that is going off. Does the Echo do that?
- 9y ago
markolschesky 9y ago
No Spotify, no buy. Being locked into Apple Music is a non-starter for me. It's still mindboggling to me that Siri can't/won't interface with my Spotify account. My lowly Amazon Echo supports this just fine. In fact, I prefer it to the spotify UX/UI.
- Spivak 9y ago
  > How dare a company lock me into their ecosystem! I want to be locked into a different ecosystem, dammit!
  - aaronblohowiak 9y ago
    The echo supports a range of music services, not limited to amazon music. I use it with pandora, for instance.
    - watty 9y ago
      AFAIK Google Home doesn't work with Amazon Music and Echo doesn't work with Google Play Music or Chromecasts.
      - blhack 9y ago
        This is correct. I have google music and my echo won't play it. Really annoying.
      - MichaelGG 9y ago
        Amazon refuses to even sell Chromecasts or Apple TVs and lies about it if you contact customer support. I've been told that "it's just out of stock", that "we had too many complaints", and even "Apple refuses to let us sell those products". It's why I canceled Amazon Prime (Funny, after being a customer for over a decade, with Prime since it was offered, cancelling was a single click, with zero follow-up or attempt at retention. Not even a "Oh, hey, why did you decide to cancel after so many years?")
thrillgore 9y ago
It must be an unusual place for Apple to be in, chasing trends as opposed to setting them.
- Someone 9y ago
  Unusual? _If_ the 'outdo' of this article really is OUTDO, it would be a repeat of what they did with MP3 players and mobile phones. Thats a big if, though. Services aren't Apple's strongpoint, and their stance on privacy means they may have to do a lot of the processing in the device, and limit their ability to rapidly improve their offering.
  - eridius 9y ago
    > Services aren't Apple's strongpoint They aren't? Tell that to the teams that run iMessage and the iTunes Music Store.
    - benburleson 9y ago
      Exactly; those are not mainstream services any more.
      - sandstrom 9y ago
        Agree, they are big but that's because they are pre-installed on hundreds of millions of hardware devices. Not because the services themselves are particularly good.
      - bykovich2 9y ago
        What do you mean? I use iMessage probably hundreds of times a day (to my chagrin, but I digress). The Music Store has been overtaken by streaming services, but it made a titanic impact on the market -- and as much hate as Apple Music gets, it's actually a completely adequate service.
      - eridius 9y ago
        You're kidding, right? iMessage has massive scale. Several years ago, Apple revealed they were processing "several billion" iMessages per day, and it's hard to imagine that number hasn't simply grown since then. As for the iTunes Music Store, I could believe that it's not used as often as previously because of the popularity of streaming services, but Apple also runs one of those streaming services (Apple Music), and they run iCloud Library which gives you access to all of your purchased music on all of your devices, and of course they also run the iOS App Store and you can't argue that doesn't have massive scale.
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ebbv 9y ago
More evidence today's Apple lacks vision. These products are niche. Some people love them I know. But look at the sales. They are not appealing to the mainstream. The future of digital assistants is not dedicated devices in every room of your home. I'm not sure what it is but it's not that.
Analemma_ 9y ago
If they don't turn some kind of key that makes Siri about 10x better than it is now simultaneously with release, this thing is DOA.
- mortenjorck 9y ago
  Without visual feedback to see misheard phrases in real-time, the form factor alone effectively necessitates a massive increase in accuracy.
draw_down 9y ago
I still haven't seen a compelling use of these things. It could still happen, but haven't seen it yet.
- pbarnes_1 9y ago
  There really isn't one. But normal people (i.e. non techies) use these things for small "factoid" type situations. Weather, sports scores, stuff like that. It takes longer to ask a thing what the weather is than looking at my phone, but that's just how it is.
philip1209 9y ago
Last-mover advantage seems to be Apple's specialty.
Sargos 9y ago
Hmm, I think this will be a tough market to compete in for Apple. I think it's generally accepted that Siri is the worst of the assistants out there right now and that underlying technology will drive this entire new product. I really think Apple is going to need to decide between privacy and AI research as they are struggling to keep up and having a product like this will only make that gap more pronounced.
- jeckylee 9y ago
  Exactly. I use Siri on my iPhone, also tried Google assitant app recently, having an echo at home too. Siri is way worse than the other two in terms of speech recognition and features. I felt Apple is better off to completely buy Google as the back end and simply focus on the hardware, where is their strength.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    I think this is less a Siri device and more a home-TV device. My understanding is that this device includes a screen. Right now I could use a 17" 16:9 iPad with a stand and maybe an optional detachable keyboard, as I find I'm using my 12" iPad Pro more and more for TV/movie viewing. I could use something like that for a bedroom nightstand. I don't think Siri will be the focus of this product. I hope not, at least, because it definitely isn't the top assistant. Apple's strength is it's device media capabilities, and they should exploit that instead.
    - JCharante 9y ago
      Bloomberg said that the device won't have a screen, and will instead focus on having a better speaker.
  - vlunkr 9y ago
    That's interesting. I've always thought echo was much much worse at speech recognition. It also does ridiculous things, like my toddler asked it what bread is, and echo proceeded to tell us about Bread, the rock band... Granted, Siri tends to just open up a web search.
redial 9y ago
I hope it is as impressive as the rumors claim as it'll help legitimize the "Speaker AI" market, but...what Apple needs to learn is that a product, no matter how advanced it may seem at launch, means nothing if they don't update and support it continuously. The iPad and to some extent the Apple TV both have top of the line hardware. The software on the other hand...improvements every 2 or 3 years don't inspire confidence. Updates to Siri once a year would kill this product.
dchuk 9y ago
Going to be hard to outdo Google and Amazon with the dogshit that is Siri. Ok Google and Alexa are lightyears ahead of Siri in terms of voice recognition and response.
- jrs95 9y ago
  But at least it probably won't activate when someone on your TV says "Alexis"
  - knodi123 9y ago
    tell me about it. when my android voice recognition gets a little hair-trigger, do you know how hard it is to consciously avoid saying the word "ok"?
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    If that's all that's activating your Echo then consider yourself lucky.
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robalfonso 9y ago
It's not the hardware - it's the software. I went all in on Amazon Echo and Dots. I have them in my living room, office, bathroom, bedroom. The ecosystem that Amazon provides is far richer than Apple can hope to provide. Google does seem to be better positioned. Even if the hardware is amazing, I don't want Apple music (I have prime music) the voice assistant is no better and I have serious doubts about the integrations that will be available. Whats going to make this DOA is integrations, it's not in Apple's DNA and its going to be the best sounding, most beautiful, most seemless voice assistant nobody wants. I hope I'm proven wrong.
itomato 9y ago
Innovation via duplication.. Genius!
tapoxi 9y ago
Are these home speakers the new smartwatch? A product that every company has to make because it's "the big new thing" but the actual functionality is questionable? I don't understand why I'd want a tiny speaker sitting in my house listening for commands, when I already have that on my phone and it can provide a display of the results, along with voice.
- blakesterz 9y ago
  There was a great "Ask HN" thread a while ago on this and I read everything thinking "oh good, power users will tell me what I'm missing here" and when I was done I was left thinking "I am not missing anything here". In their current form, they just didn't seem to do all that much that would make any measurable difference in my life. I have an echo, it was plugged in a for a week and everyone forgot about it.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I have a Google Home, rather than an Echo, but the biggest changes are the fact that I listen to a lot more music and I have it hooked up to a Logitech Harmony Hub so that I rarely need to hunt down the TV remote. "Hey Google, Turn on the TV // Pause Roku // Volume down" are pretty useful shortcuts I have configured.
- drewrv 9y ago
  I was skeptical but bought a cheap one because I thought it would be fun to hack on. Turns out it was more useful than I imagined. We listen to more music in our living room now that it's become frictionless to play something (I'm not an audiophile but I can't listen to music on cell phone speakers). When I tell the kids it's bedtime in ten minutes and set an echo timer, they actually go upstairs when the timer goes off (probably some weird psychology going on there, but the living room telling them it's bedtime carries more authority than dads phone). The killer app for my wife and I has been OneBusAway. Being told when the next bus is coming while getting ready in the morning is awesome, much better that fumbling around with their app. Obviously your use cases may vary, but with my echo I was pleasantly surprised at how useful it was. I was given a smartwatch for free and was nevertheless disappointed at how useless it was. I can pull my phone out and do stuff with one hand, whereas on a watch you need to hold one hand in place while the other hand operates the device, meaning it's harder to use and less convenient.
ProfessorLayton 9y ago
All these companies keep pushing voice input as the way to interact with their personal assistants, I personally feel that it would be 100x better to let me interact with them however I choose. In my experience, voice recognition is just not there yet, especially noisy environments, even if some companies are better at it than others. If I could just type something into Siri I would use it countless times more. Most of my frustration comes from it misunderstanding me, often resulting in me pulling out my phone and typing in my question into search engine anyway. Additionally, I do not want my business spoken aloud.
- yincrash 9y ago
  Question, is your voice input experience mainly with iPhone and Siri? I find that voice input is fairly excellent for my Nexus 5X (less so for my Galaxy Tab). Google seems to be doing a melded experience based on their Google I/O presentations. A lot of the third party experience will involve visual responses.
- eveningcoffee 9y ago
  Worse, using voice recognition allows companies to store your voice samples, that allows them to generate your voice fingerprints, that allows your presence to be detected once you happen to say something out loud in proximity of such devices.
  - rubatuga 9y ago
    That's only google, Siri doesn't work that way.
    - kobayashi 9y ago
      I'd love to believe that -- any source?
    - eveningcoffee 9y ago
      It really does not matter if a single device does not work this way if the global trend is to push boundaries of privacy to closer and closer to non-existence. I am afraid that soon it is hard for general public to avoid the situation where when they flush the toiled some unexpected device will recognise it and report to the headquarters.
cmsimike 9y ago
I wonder what condition this Siri will be in. I feel pretty slighted by Apple in their decision not to include HomeKit in MacOS Siri.
rubatuga 9y ago
I believe the best way to interact with Siri is through the Apple Watch, something that is always attached to you and doesn't require you to shout across the room. The Watch also connects to Wifi, and can work independently of the iPhone, allowing Siri, iMessage, calling etc. Also, the siri speaker has to deal with the possibility of multiple users using "Hey Siri" while the apple watch can be tied to an individual person.
clintcparker 9y ago
I keep wondering why they don't open Siri up to the command line or applescripts. It seems like that would be a great way to grow the Siri ecosystem. Does HN have any ideas why it is so locked down?
excalibur 9y ago
> Apple Inc. is already in your pocket, on your desk and underneath your television. Soon, a device embossed with “Designed by Apple in California” may be on your nightstand or kitchen counter as well. Nope, nope, nope, and nope.
thebouv 9y ago
If I could make Siri consistently "Call Mom" without asking "Which Mom?" showing "Carla's Mom", "Erica's Mom", and "Mom" I'd be happy with Siri. But I literally have a single contact named "Mom" that is also starred as a favorite. Yet sometimes Siri calls my mom, and sometimes she asks me "Which Mom?" even though I always choose the same one. Jerk.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  Google's Assistant isn't any better at this sort of inference. I have my wife's work and cell number and I get asked any time I use it which one though I'm reasonably sure I have never once caller her work number. The Google Assistant happily asks me if I want to finish researching "Care Bears" because I once searched for them on Amazon using Firefox in Incognito Mode on a friend's computer but it can't seem to figure out that I always only ever call my wife on her cellphone.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    Google Home is able to infer which "mom" you're referring to as demoed at their I/O 2017 presentation. https://youtu.be/Y2VF8tmLFHw?t=33m32s https://youtu.be/Y2VF8tmLFHw?t=33m32s
    - cptskippy 9y ago
      Uhuh... I tried to ask it for directions to Mom's tonight in the car and then for my mom's address by her full name and it failed on both attempts. It did however manage to find her Pinterest account.
- timdeneau 9y ago
  Siri understands contact relationships if you fill out the "related names" in your contact cards. Go to your own contact card, and then set a related name for mother to your Mom’s contact card. The next time you ask Siri to “Call Mom” it will do it. It’s unnecessarily complicated, it should be able to infer which one, but there’s the workaround.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
Multiuser voice recognition is now table stakes for these type of devices. Not to mention contextual inference, free phone calls and screen casting.
stevewillows 9y ago
I still don't understand the desire to have any sort of electronics constantly listening for commands. In the balance between convenience and privacy, to me, devices like this don't seem to add enough value to draw me in.
- conductr 9y ago
  I agree. It's weird as f* having every word spoke in my home recorded. I guess they say they're not recording, but you know they are or will soon.
  - grillvogel 9y ago
    they are recording, there was a murder case recently that used the alexa voice recordings as evidence
    - linkregister 9y ago
      Is that how it happened?
    - hbosch 9y ago
      Incorrect. Police asked Amazon for a murder suspect's Alexa history, and Amazon initially refused until the suspect/customer gave permission. It is yet to be proven if anything was recorded without the wakeword.
    - eric_the_read 9y ago
      All we know is that the recordings were requested by the prosecution; we have no idea what, if anything, is included in them. In particular, we do NOT know if anything other than the wake word, followed by a few seconds of query, is included. Everything else we've learned, including Amazon's own statements on what is recorded and transmitted, suggests that nothing else is included.
  - sib 9y ago
    They are not recording (other than when the wake word has been detected, correctly or incorrectly.)
S_A_P 9y ago
Here is where Steve Jobs would have said "No". stay focused apple...
- proee 9y ago
  At least see the product first, before making such a statement. Apple does quite well by entering a market late (digital music, phones, etc.) and then dominating it by making superior products and user experiences. If Apple releases the product and it's just a "me too device" with nothing new, then your statement is reasonable.
myrandomcomment 9y ago
So I really have tried to use Siri. Really. I want it to work. My home ecosystem is all Apple (for the user facing devices). However most of the time with anything beyond "set a reminder or set an alarm" I give up and just do it the old fashioned way. Part of the issue is that the backend search results are just no where as good as Google. IIRC Apple is using Bing for that..Ugh.
skdotdan 9y ago
I don't understand this focus on speech-as-interface.
- drewrv 9y ago
  The industry is run by people who grew up on Star Trek!
- singularity2001 9y ago
  try to communicate with your friends without talking and you might understand the usefulness of speech-as-interface
mmanfrin 9y ago
Macrumors says they are going to differentiate themselves by deeply integrating with the Apple ecosystem and having a better speaker. These aren't real selling points. Google Home integrates very well with Google products (out of the box I thought to try asking it to 'play the latest video from [youtube channel] on my shield', and it worked, exactly as expected. As far as speakers, Amazon started with a device that had very good speakers, and has since downgraded to a puck.
- CharlesW 9y ago
  FWIW, the speaker on the original Amazon Echo isn't very good. (I also own small Bluetooth speakers from Sony and Anker, and both are appreciably better for music — enough so that I go out of my way to use them while cleaning or whatnot, even though the Echo is right there.)
grillvogel 9y ago
does apple still innovate anymore or just follow trends that are already on their way out?
- drewrv 9y ago
  Apple has always refined things that are almost working but clunky and awkward to use. Mp3 players were terrible for non-nerds for example. Browsing the web on a palm pilot sucked. Apple's problem now is that their competitors are building pretty good stuff. Echo is a great combination of hardware and software. Surface laptops and tablets are quality. VR/AR is an area where everything is clunky and awkward to use and Apple could probably build something really amazing here but the market size is tiny and the use cases are outside of apples wheelhouse (industrial applications and gaming right now).
tdburn 9y ago
Hey if they can bring something that truly differentiates from the other two that would be awesome. Home kit doesn't give much hope.
jerrysievert 9y ago
I've had a hard time finding much useful with these devices - anecdotally even my friends have been ditching their Echo's. I've ended up dropping my usage to setting timers and turning on/off lights, both of which don't work with Siri in MacOS. I'd hope that they'd get their own ecosystem in order before adding yet another gadget, but that's not happened time and time again under Cook's leadership.
Jayakumark 9y ago
Siri is worst for indian English Accent like me, Could not even compare it with Google. Google is light years ahead , it can recognize my english 100% and most of the times even transliterated tamil spoken in English (another local indian language)
pbarnes_1 9y ago
The problem, for me, is that Siri is just really dumb in comparison to Alexa and Google Assistant. And those aren't that smart yet either.
paul7986 9y ago
Maybe and finally a dedicated App Store will be established and developers can make money from the apps/new skills they create for Apple's AI speaker! Right now on the other platforms devs are creating skills but there is no revenue stream for your efforts!
argonaut 9y ago
People (rightfully) pointing out that Siri sucks compared to competitors should realize that Apple is making a very serious tradeoff in favor of privacy. It's a huge handicap when you're only allowed to train models on device using just one user's data, or only allowed to use various complicated privacy preserving training methods (I'm not talking about taking a user's data, removing the obviously identifying fields and sending it to the server, which does not really preserve privacy except for simple statistics). There's no way Apple can train the same super complicated deep learning models that Google uses, for example, when Apple can't just gobble up all their users' data. And all of the "provably" private methods for training models incur significant accuracy penalties. So it's a little rich that users on HN will complain about Siri on one hand, and on the other hand complain about losing privacy. In the end I think this is a fatal mistake for Apple: people love to complain about privacy, but time and time again reveal through their purchasing choices that they don't actually care, especially when there's usability tradeoffs. Apple would be better off vacuuming up all their users' data if they don't want to be crushed by Google/Amazon.
- wand3r 9y ago
  Of the 3 companies, Apple is likely the most privacy centric. However, they have a fuck ton of private data. You raise an interesting point; it may explain some percentage of why Siri is worse. Although, it has been in use longer and is still pretty shit. Apple sends a lot of telemetry and search data. Also, I find it baffling anyone would want to put an internet connected always on mic in their house no matter who makes it. Insane.
  - adpirz 9y ago
    How much worse is it than an internet connected always on mic on your person at all times, which also tracks your every move to boot?
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Also anything that Siri can do, you allow Apple to do. Because ultimately it's Apple that is sending the response commands back to your computer or phone.

73 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

Normally I would count this as an auto-win for Apple but the interesting thing about these speakers isn't necessarily the hardware itself but the many services that back them. I play with both Home and Echo a lot and I'm most impressed by how quickly Google is adding lots of useful functionality. Their documentation and evangelism for developing on their platform seems to be pretty good too. I think Apple will catch up quickly as they did with the Watch.

stdgy 9y ago
As far as I'm concerned, Siri is on death watch until Apple figures out a strategy to open it up. Outside of setting timers, creating reminders, setting alarms, doing a little dictating or mishearing directions, the product is stagnant. I just don't see a lot of utility going forward unless they liberalize the service and allow other people to develop new experiences for users. That should also give them new data to mine and allow good voice UI patterns to bubble up. Not sure how they should go about designing a framework for developers to plug-in to, though. It's a tricky problem. But presumably they've learned some things after 'sharing' some of Siri with Uber and Facebook and that could help them move forward.
- eridius 9y ago
  Apple already opened up Siri. Third-party app developers can now add their own Siri integration (though I don't know how extensive this is, having never looked into the details myself). But it seems like not very many third-party developers are actually bothering to do so.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    There's just a few things you can do. Call someone, send a message, hail a cab, ask for directions, stuff like that. Six scenarios in total. You could try to WhatsApp someone with Siri, probably that'll work. Though I hate using voice commands I never tried it.
- dkrich 9y ago
  I think that Apple has bet (correctly) that voice is a feature not a platform and that great hardware will make people buy into its services. Voice is great for a few things but very lousy for most things. Obviously it's all conjecture at this point, but my guess is that this product will augment the use of its devices for the things that voice is superior to GUI for (playing music and basic queries). Since Apple typically blows the competition out of the water with design and marketing, I imagine that this will do pretty well in this space (just imagine walking into an Apple store and seeing an IKEA-like display with a sleek home theatre and its speaker system on display). I do think that the walled-garden is concerning since you can't use it with all music services, for example, but on the other hand, if its a premium speaker system that might be enough to push me the other way and switch to Apple music. The question is is the product compelling enough to get people to buy into the platform.
  - darawk 9y ago
    Apple's prowess is in designing physically attractive objects, and easy to use UI. Voice has very little UI, and it has even less use for physical appearance. That's not to say that how these things look isn't important. It is. But it's nowhere near as important as it was with a phone.
    - dkrich 9y ago
      My argument is that voice isn't all that useful in general and that if Apple creates a much higher quality product than Echo, for example, that people will want it because it's a very nice speaker that looks really cool and can play music, give the weather, and set a timer by voice, which covers the majority of use cases. In other words, a voice platform that works 10x better than another may only be slightly more useful to the average consumer while if the actual speaker is 10x better, it might be 10x more compelling.
      - darawk 9y ago
        Ah, ya. Then I agree with you there.
  - 9y ago
- rajathagasthya 9y ago
  I'd really love if Apple integrated the Workflow app they acquired into Siri. I think it could be a straightforward way to let Siri do more useful things than just setting reminders and asking about the weather. They also have improve the voice recognition big time since Siri has real difficulties understanding if you have an accent.

dkonofalski 9y ago

Oh great... another self-driving car project... /s To me, this just feels like another jump on the bandwagon. I have an Echo and, while it was awesome at first, with all the skills and everything it feels less amazing than it did when I first got it. Now, I feel like it mishears us all the time, it doesn't give the answers we'd normally get unless we say things in a very specific way, and all the cool tricks ("Who is the mother of dragons?") are just gimmicks now. Unless Apple can actually make their version useful and able to understand questions that aren't formed in "robot" as the language, I don't see the point of this.

Yhippa 9y ago
I've found the Home useful. All I can use the Echo for is to set multiple simultaneous kitchen timers and to play music while cooking. The Echo just doesn't seem to be able to handle natural language well or there isn't support for what I'm asking.
- Macsenour 9y ago
  I use my Alexa also for listening to Baseball which, correct me if I'm wrong Internet, Home can't do.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I have no idea where one would listen to baseball, but Home has the ability to play radio stations at least through TuneIn and iHeartRadio: https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7071793?hl=en https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7071793?hl=en One of the examples is playing ESPN Radio.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  Multiple kitchen timers is by far the most common use case I have for my Home. Not coincidentally, it's also my #1 complaint. Google, when a timer goes off, please please just tell me the name of the timer that is going off. Does the Echo do that?
9y ago

markolschesky 9y ago

No Spotify, no buy. Being locked into Apple Music is a non-starter for me. It's still mindboggling to me that Siri can't/won't interface with my Spotify account. My lowly Amazon Echo supports this just fine. In fact, I prefer it to the spotify UX/UI.

Spivak 9y ago
> How dare a company lock me into their ecosystem! I want to be locked into a different ecosystem, dammit!
- aaronblohowiak 9y ago
  The echo supports a range of music services, not limited to amazon music. I use it with pandora, for instance.
  - watty 9y ago
    AFAIK Google Home doesn't work with Amazon Music and Echo doesn't work with Google Play Music or Chromecasts.
    - blhack 9y ago
      This is correct. I have google music and my echo won't play it. Really annoying.
    - MichaelGG 9y ago
      Amazon refuses to even sell Chromecasts or Apple TVs and lies about it if you contact customer support. I've been told that "it's just out of stock", that "we had too many complaints", and even "Apple refuses to let us sell those products". It's why I canceled Amazon Prime (Funny, after being a customer for over a decade, with Prime since it was offered, cancelling was a single click, with zero follow-up or attempt at retention. Not even a "Oh, hey, why did you decide to cancel after so many years?")

thrillgore 9y ago

It must be an unusual place for Apple to be in, chasing trends as opposed to setting them.

Someone 9y ago
Unusual? _If_ the 'outdo' of this article really is OUTDO, it would be a repeat of what they did with MP3 players and mobile phones. Thats a big if, though. Services aren't Apple's strongpoint, and their stance on privacy means they may have to do a lot of the processing in the device, and limit their ability to rapidly improve their offering.
- eridius 9y ago
  > Services aren't Apple's strongpoint They aren't? Tell that to the teams that run iMessage and the iTunes Music Store.
  - benburleson 9y ago
    Exactly; those are not mainstream services any more.
    - sandstrom 9y ago
      Agree, they are big but that's because they are pre-installed on hundreds of millions of hardware devices. Not because the services themselves are particularly good.
    - bykovich2 9y ago
      What do you mean? I use iMessage probably hundreds of times a day (to my chagrin, but I digress). The Music Store has been overtaken by streaming services, but it made a titanic impact on the market -- and as much hate as Apple Music gets, it's actually a completely adequate service.
    - eridius 9y ago
      You're kidding, right? iMessage has massive scale. Several years ago, Apple revealed they were processing "several billion" iMessages per day, and it's hard to imagine that number hasn't simply grown since then. As for the iTunes Music Store, I could believe that it's not used as often as previously because of the popularity of streaming services, but Apple also runs one of those streaming services (Apple Music), and they run iCloud Library which gives you access to all of your purchased music on all of your devices, and of course they also run the iOS App Store and you can't argue that doesn't have massive scale.

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ebbv 9y ago

More evidence today's Apple lacks vision. These products are niche. Some people love them I know. But look at the sales. They are not appealing to the mainstream. The future of digital assistants is not dedicated devices in every room of your home. I'm not sure what it is but it's not that.

Analemma_ 9y ago

If they don't turn some kind of key that makes Siri about 10x better than it is now simultaneously with release, this thing is DOA.

mortenjorck 9y ago
Without visual feedback to see misheard phrases in real-time, the form factor alone effectively necessitates a massive increase in accuracy.

draw_down 9y ago

I still haven't seen a compelling use of these things. It could still happen, but haven't seen it yet.

pbarnes_1 9y ago
There really isn't one. But normal people (i.e. non techies) use these things for small "factoid" type situations. Weather, sports scores, stuff like that. It takes longer to ask a thing what the weather is than looking at my phone, but that's just how it is.

philip1209 9y ago

Last-mover advantage seems to be Apple's specialty.

Sargos 9y ago

Hmm, I think this will be a tough market to compete in for Apple. I think it's generally accepted that Siri is the worst of the assistants out there right now and that underlying technology will drive this entire new product. I really think Apple is going to need to decide between privacy and AI research as they are struggling to keep up and having a product like this will only make that gap more pronounced.

jeckylee 9y ago
Exactly. I use Siri on my iPhone, also tried Google assitant app recently, having an echo at home too. Siri is way worse than the other two in terms of speech recognition and features. I felt Apple is better off to completely buy Google as the back end and simply focus on the hardware, where is their strength.
- mozumder 9y ago
  I think this is less a Siri device and more a home-TV device. My understanding is that this device includes a screen. Right now I could use a 17" 16:9 iPad with a stand and maybe an optional detachable keyboard, as I find I'm using my 12" iPad Pro more and more for TV/movie viewing. I could use something like that for a bedroom nightstand. I don't think Siri will be the focus of this product. I hope not, at least, because it definitely isn't the top assistant. Apple's strength is it's device media capabilities, and they should exploit that instead.
  - JCharante 9y ago
    Bloomberg said that the device won't have a screen, and will instead focus on having a better speaker.
- vlunkr 9y ago
  That's interesting. I've always thought echo was much much worse at speech recognition. It also does ridiculous things, like my toddler asked it what bread is, and echo proceeded to tell us about Bread, the rock band... Granted, Siri tends to just open up a web search.

redial 9y ago

I hope it is as impressive as the rumors claim as it'll help legitimize the "Speaker AI" market, but...what Apple needs to learn is that a product, no matter how advanced it may seem at launch, means nothing if they don't update and support it continuously. The iPad and to some extent the Apple TV both have top of the line hardware. The software on the other hand...improvements every 2 or 3 years don't inspire confidence. Updates to Siri once a year would kill this product.

dchuk 9y ago

Going to be hard to outdo Google and Amazon with the dogshit that is Siri. Ok Google and Alexa are lightyears ahead of Siri in terms of voice recognition and response.

jrs95 9y ago
But at least it probably won't activate when someone on your TV says "Alexis"
- knodi123 9y ago
  tell me about it. when my android voice recognition gets a little hair-trigger, do you know how hard it is to consciously avoid saying the word "ok"?
- cptskippy 9y ago
  If that's all that's activating your Echo then consider yourself lucky.

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robalfonso 9y ago

It's not the hardware - it's the software. I went all in on Amazon Echo and Dots. I have them in my living room, office, bathroom, bedroom. The ecosystem that Amazon provides is far richer than Apple can hope to provide. Google does seem to be better positioned. Even if the hardware is amazing, I don't want Apple music (I have prime music) the voice assistant is no better and I have serious doubts about the integrations that will be available. Whats going to make this DOA is integrations, it's not in Apple's DNA and its going to be the best sounding, most beautiful, most seemless voice assistant nobody wants. I hope I'm proven wrong.

itomato 9y ago

Innovation via duplication.. Genius!

tapoxi 9y ago

Are these home speakers the new smartwatch? A product that every company has to make because it's "the big new thing" but the actual functionality is questionable? I don't understand why I'd want a tiny speaker sitting in my house listening for commands, when I already have that on my phone and it can provide a display of the results, along with voice.

blakesterz 9y ago
There was a great "Ask HN" thread a while ago on this and I read everything thinking "oh good, power users will tell me what I'm missing here" and when I was done I was left thinking "I am not missing anything here". In their current form, they just didn't seem to do all that much that would make any measurable difference in my life. I have an echo, it was plugged in a for a week and everyone forgot about it.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I have a Google Home, rather than an Echo, but the biggest changes are the fact that I listen to a lot more music and I have it hooked up to a Logitech Harmony Hub so that I rarely need to hunt down the TV remote. "Hey Google, Turn on the TV // Pause Roku // Volume down" are pretty useful shortcuts I have configured.
drewrv 9y ago
I was skeptical but bought a cheap one because I thought it would be fun to hack on. Turns out it was more useful than I imagined. We listen to more music in our living room now that it's become frictionless to play something (I'm not an audiophile but I can't listen to music on cell phone speakers). When I tell the kids it's bedtime in ten minutes and set an echo timer, they actually go upstairs when the timer goes off (probably some weird psychology going on there, but the living room telling them it's bedtime carries more authority than dads phone). The killer app for my wife and I has been OneBusAway. Being told when the next bus is coming while getting ready in the morning is awesome, much better that fumbling around with their app. Obviously your use cases may vary, but with my echo I was pleasantly surprised at how useful it was. I was given a smartwatch for free and was nevertheless disappointed at how useless it was. I can pull my phone out and do stuff with one hand, whereas on a watch you need to hold one hand in place while the other hand operates the device, meaning it's harder to use and less convenient.

ProfessorLayton 9y ago

All these companies keep pushing voice input as the way to interact with their personal assistants, I personally feel that it would be 100x better to let me interact with them however I choose. In my experience, voice recognition is just not there yet, especially noisy environments, even if some companies are better at it than others. If I could just type something into Siri I would use it countless times more. Most of my frustration comes from it misunderstanding me, often resulting in me pulling out my phone and typing in my question into search engine anyway. Additionally, I do not want my business spoken aloud.

yincrash 9y ago
Question, is your voice input experience mainly with iPhone and Siri? I find that voice input is fairly excellent for my Nexus 5X (less so for my Galaxy Tab). Google seems to be doing a melded experience based on their Google I/O presentations. A lot of the third party experience will involve visual responses.
eveningcoffee 9y ago
Worse, using voice recognition allows companies to store your voice samples, that allows them to generate your voice fingerprints, that allows your presence to be detected once you happen to say something out loud in proximity of such devices.
- rubatuga 9y ago
  That's only google, Siri doesn't work that way.
  - kobayashi 9y ago
    I'd love to believe that -- any source?
  - eveningcoffee 9y ago
    It really does not matter if a single device does not work this way if the global trend is to push boundaries of privacy to closer and closer to non-existence. I am afraid that soon it is hard for general public to avoid the situation where when they flush the toiled some unexpected device will recognise it and report to the headquarters.

cmsimike 9y ago

I wonder what condition this Siri will be in. I feel pretty slighted by Apple in their decision not to include HomeKit in MacOS Siri.

rubatuga 9y ago

I believe the best way to interact with Siri is through the Apple Watch, something that is always attached to you and doesn't require you to shout across the room. The Watch also connects to Wifi, and can work independently of the iPhone, allowing Siri, iMessage, calling etc. Also, the siri speaker has to deal with the possibility of multiple users using "Hey Siri" while the apple watch can be tied to an individual person.

clintcparker 9y ago

I keep wondering why they don't open Siri up to the command line or applescripts. It seems like that would be a great way to grow the Siri ecosystem. Does HN have any ideas why it is so locked down?

excalibur 9y ago

> Apple Inc. is already in your pocket, on your desk and underneath your television. Soon, a device embossed with “Designed by Apple in California” may be on your nightstand or kitchen counter as well. Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

thebouv 9y ago

If I could make Siri consistently "Call Mom" without asking "Which Mom?" showing "Carla's Mom", "Erica's Mom", and "Mom" I'd be happy with Siri. But I literally have a single contact named "Mom" that is also starred as a favorite. Yet sometimes Siri calls my mom, and sometimes she asks me "Which Mom?" even though I always choose the same one. Jerk.

cptskippy 9y ago
Google's Assistant isn't any better at this sort of inference. I have my wife's work and cell number and I get asked any time I use it which one though I'm reasonably sure I have never once caller her work number. The Google Assistant happily asks me if I want to finish researching "Care Bears" because I once searched for them on Amazon using Firefox in Incognito Mode on a friend's computer but it can't seem to figure out that I always only ever call my wife on her cellphone.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  Google Home is able to infer which "mom" you're referring to as demoed at their I/O 2017 presentation. https://youtu.be/Y2VF8tmLFHw?t=33m32s https://youtu.be/Y2VF8tmLFHw?t=33m32s
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    Uhuh... I tried to ask it for directions to Mom's tonight in the car and then for my mom's address by her full name and it failed on both attempts. It did however manage to find her Pinterest account.
timdeneau 9y ago
Siri understands contact relationships if you fill out the "related names" in your contact cards. Go to your own contact card, and then set a related name for mother to your Mom’s contact card. The next time you ask Siri to “Call Mom” it will do it. It’s unnecessarily complicated, it should be able to infer which one, but there’s the workaround.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

Multiuser voice recognition is now table stakes for these type of devices. Not to mention contextual inference, free phone calls and screen casting.

stevewillows 9y ago

I still don't understand the desire to have any sort of electronics constantly listening for commands. In the balance between convenience and privacy, to me, devices like this don't seem to add enough value to draw me in.

conductr 9y ago
I agree. It's weird as f* having every word spoke in my home recorded. I guess they say they're not recording, but you know they are or will soon.
- grillvogel 9y ago
  they are recording, there was a murder case recently that used the alexa voice recordings as evidence
  - linkregister 9y ago
    Is that how it happened?
  - hbosch 9y ago
    Incorrect. Police asked Amazon for a murder suspect's Alexa history, and Amazon initially refused until the suspect/customer gave permission. It is yet to be proven if anything was recorded without the wakeword.
  - eric_the_read 9y ago
    All we know is that the recordings were requested by the prosecution; we have no idea what, if anything, is included in them. In particular, we do NOT know if anything other than the wake word, followed by a few seconds of query, is included. Everything else we've learned, including Amazon's own statements on what is recorded and transmitted, suggests that nothing else is included.
- sib 9y ago
  They are not recording (other than when the wake word has been detected, correctly or incorrectly.)

S_A_P 9y ago

Here is where Steve Jobs would have said "No". stay focused apple...

proee 9y ago
At least see the product first, before making such a statement. Apple does quite well by entering a market late (digital music, phones, etc.) and then dominating it by making superior products and user experiences. If Apple releases the product and it's just a "me too device" with nothing new, then your statement is reasonable.

myrandomcomment 9y ago

So I really have tried to use Siri. Really. I want it to work. My home ecosystem is all Apple (for the user facing devices). However most of the time with anything beyond "set a reminder or set an alarm" I give up and just do it the old fashioned way. Part of the issue is that the backend search results are just no where as good as Google. IIRC Apple is using Bing for that..Ugh.

skdotdan 9y ago

I don't understand this focus on speech-as-interface.

drewrv 9y ago
The industry is run by people who grew up on Star Trek!
singularity2001 9y ago
try to communicate with your friends without talking and you might understand the usefulness of speech-as-interface

mmanfrin 9y ago

Macrumors says they are going to differentiate themselves by deeply integrating with the Apple ecosystem and having a better speaker. These aren't real selling points. Google Home integrates very well with Google products (out of the box I thought to try asking it to 'play the latest video from [youtube channel] on my shield', and it worked, exactly as expected. As far as speakers, Amazon started with a device that had very good speakers, and has since downgraded to a puck.

CharlesW 9y ago
FWIW, the speaker on the original Amazon Echo isn't very good. (I also own small Bluetooth speakers from Sony and Anker, and both are appreciably better for music — enough so that I go out of my way to use them while cleaning or whatnot, even though the Echo is right there.)

grillvogel 9y ago

does apple still innovate anymore or just follow trends that are already on their way out?

drewrv 9y ago
Apple has always refined things that are almost working but clunky and awkward to use. Mp3 players were terrible for non-nerds for example. Browsing the web on a palm pilot sucked. Apple's problem now is that their competitors are building pretty good stuff. Echo is a great combination of hardware and software. Surface laptops and tablets are quality. VR/AR is an area where everything is clunky and awkward to use and Apple could probably build something really amazing here but the market size is tiny and the use cases are outside of apples wheelhouse (industrial applications and gaming right now).

tdburn 9y ago

Hey if they can bring something that truly differentiates from the other two that would be awesome. Home kit doesn't give much hope.

jerrysievert 9y ago

I've had a hard time finding much useful with these devices - anecdotally even my friends have been ditching their Echo's. I've ended up dropping my usage to setting timers and turning on/off lights, both of which don't work with Siri in MacOS. I'd hope that they'd get their own ecosystem in order before adding yet another gadget, but that's not happened time and time again under Cook's leadership.

Jayakumark 9y ago

Siri is worst for indian English Accent like me, Could not even compare it with Google. Google is light years ahead , it can recognize my english 100% and most of the times even transliterated tamil spoken in English (another local indian language)

pbarnes_1 9y ago

The problem, for me, is that Siri is just really dumb in comparison to Alexa and Google Assistant. And those aren't that smart yet either.

paul7986 9y ago

Maybe and finally a dedicated App Store will be established and developers can make money from the apps/new skills they create for Apple's AI speaker! Right now on the other platforms devs are creating skills but there is no revenue stream for your efforts!

argonaut 9y ago

People (rightfully) pointing out that Siri sucks compared to competitors should realize that Apple is making a very serious tradeoff in favor of privacy. It's a huge handicap when you're only allowed to train models on device using just one user's data, or only allowed to use various complicated privacy preserving training methods (I'm not talking about taking a user's data, removing the obviously identifying fields and sending it to the server, which does not really preserve privacy except for simple statistics). There's no way Apple can train the same super complicated deep learning models that Google uses, for example, when Apple can't just gobble up all their users' data. And all of the "provably" private methods for training models incur significant accuracy penalties. So it's a little rich that users on HN will complain about Siri on one hand, and on the other hand complain about losing privacy. In the end I think this is a fatal mistake for Apple: people love to complain about privacy, but time and time again reveal through their purchasing choices that they don't actually care, especially when there's usability tradeoffs. Apple would be better off vacuuming up all their users' data if they don't want to be crushed by Google/Amazon.

wand3r 9y ago
Of the 3 companies, Apple is likely the most privacy centric. However, they have a fuck ton of private data. You raise an interesting point; it may explain some percentage of why Siri is worse. Although, it has been in use longer and is still pretty shit. Apple sends a lot of telemetry and search data. Also, I find it baffling anyone would want to put an internet connected always on mic in their house no matter who makes it. Insane.
- adpirz 9y ago
  How much worse is it than an internet connected always on mic on your person at all times, which also tracks your every move to boot?
tinus_hn 9y ago
Also anything that Siri can do, you allow Apple to do. Because ultimately it's Apple that is sending the response commands back to your computer or phone.