Apple's HomePod smart speaker is official with big focus on audio quality
At today's WWDC, Apple's "one last
thing" announcement had to do with the much-rumored smart speaker. It's
finally official now, and it's called HomePod. Like the name implies, Apple's
positioning of the HomePod seems to be all about the music, thus trying to
avoid pitting its virtual assistant features directly against competitors such
as Amazon Echo and Google Home.
The HomePod is less than 7" tall. It has
a seven tweeter array on the bottom, and a 4" Apple-designed woofer up top
with auto bass EQ. Six microphones are always listening for the "Hey
Siri" trigger phrase which activates the speaker. The device is spatially
aware, it tries to detect the features of the room it's in and optimize its
audio output accordingly. It will also identify different parts of a song and
try to focus the sound for the best possible listening experience.
The HomePod is powered by an Apple A8
chipset, which enables real-time acoustic modelling, audio beamforming, and
multi-channel echo cancellation. You can set up two HomePods and they will
automatically work together. And of course Siri inside the HomePod will be able
to do more for you than just play music from Apple's streaming service.
Supported features include news, unit
conversion, messages, reminders, podcast playback, setting alarms and timers,
translation, stock info, general knowledge, weather, traffic info, sports
scores, and it also works as a HomeKit bridge.
The speaker will be priced at $349, which is
much more than the Amazon Echos and Google Homes of the world cost. It will be
shipping in December in the US, UK, and Australia, in white and Space Gray. For
now it remains unclear whether it will support third party services such as
Spotify.
Source: gsmarena
Follow us on Twitter
Like our page on Facebook