I assume we should expect to see a Bixby speaker from Samsung next - seeing as Samsung likes to copy apple’s designs. Who knows, maybe they will release a speaker with ST integrated to go along with their new Samsung connect wifi.
In other words, it doesn’t look more intelligent than the Echo. It’s nowhere near as intelligent as the Google Home, which is powered by the Assistant and taps into Google Search.
This is literally a smart speaker, not a voice assistant.
I bet that “Echo killer” headline was written by some layout person, not the Author of the article, who seems much more realistic.
There will be a 3rd party to come in and merge all 3 technologies and release the “GEchle Smart Pod” for a lower cost than everyone else with a wake word of “Clap On” “Clap Off”.
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I think the difference is more a matter of degree than of kind. Both the Echo and the HomePod are combinations of voice-recognition (plus smart assistant) and speaker system in one package. The speaker system in the HomePod appears to be a higher-end one than the one in the Echo, but that doesn’t really change what the authors themselves say in the very first line of the piece:
“We just got our first look at Apple’s long-awaited Amazon Echo rival.”
Maybe they meant that by decibel output, they could drown the sound coming from our Echos? 
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With AirPlay 2 It’s a Sonos killer, not an Echo killer.
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I just stopped laughing from this funny post!
Apple knows their strengths and weaknesses very well:
Weakness - Unable to lead out in new and innovated ideas although their marketing machine wants the apple fan base to believe they do.
Strength - Take what other’s innovate in and polish it and repackage it with great industrial design and convince the apple fan base it’s worth the high price.
… well looks like I have to take “great industrial design” off the strength column
Somebody has to pay for that new round campus or theirs.
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It’s so funny that things were so quiet with respect to Google Home and Echo for quite a while and then the explosion of things being delivered from both in a two week stretch and now the release of The Talking Toilet Paper.
The one thing I will say is that this is friggen great for the industry and us, because they are going to just continue to go back and forth now outdoing each other and introducing something the other doesn’t in rapid succession. I’m also waiting for them to give us the choice of names as a wake command and gender / accent / personality trait selections.
This article looks specifically at the music player aspect:
Apple just announced HomePod, its worst-named product ever but also its most interesting for several years, if you’re into music.
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It is a voice-controlled, high-end, Wi-Fi speaker with seven ‘beam forming’ Tweeters and an upward-firing woofer. It kind of takes on Google Echo but mainly it’s going up against wireless, multi-room speakers from the likes of Sonos.
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This is a smart, voice-activated Sonos rival rather than a late, unwanted Echo rival. You can buy several and use them for multi-room, or even pair two of them in stereo. Just like a Sonos/Sonos rival.
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And some more Sonos news from today’s announcements: 
At WWDC, Apple announced the speaker category for HomeKit, so other speaker makers could more tightly integrate with iOS. Interestingly, Sonos was absent from the list of early speaker partners.
“Google Echo”?
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Hey, I just link to this stuff, I don’t write it. 
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I thought maybe an alliance was being formed to vote Apple off the island.
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#conspiracytheory #allisfairinloveandwar #marketshare
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They need a x 1000 
only for shares like this!
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I’ve mentioned this before, but Siri uses an anonymizer process before sending voice data to the cloud for parsing. Google and Amazon do not.
What that means is if law enforcement hands Amazon or Google a warrant asking for the digital recordings of voice requests made to your specific device, there is data that could be turned over.
With Apple, Apple itself has no way of knowing which Siri requests were made by which Apple devices, because an anonymous ID is assigned each time.
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