Apple Siri Speaker
After Google Home made its interesting debut last 18 May, Amazon Echo will have to face another stiff competitor in its effort to integrate all web function in one place. This time the challenger comes from tech giant Apple after it was announced that they are seriously working to give consumers a Siri-powered speaker for the home.

According to a report from The Information, Apple is also opening Siri up to third-party apps so developers can finally tap into the voice assistant. The report states that an Echo rival is a more longterm project, while creating and releasing a Siri software development kit is more likely to happen first. In fact, the Siri SDK could arrive as early as June during Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June.

While some third-party companies have gained access to Siri, such as Yelp, they've only done so by way of specially crafted deals with Apple. A SDK would let any developer utilize Apple's voice assistant.

The Siri speaker has been in development since long before the arrival of the Echo, the report states. Some confirmed features include the ability to turn on and off any appliance supported by Apple's HomeKit platform and perform some of the tasks now associated with automated bots. Like Facebook's M assistant and other bots whose creators are being courted by the social network, the reimagined Siri would be more helpful and less restrained to core Apple features like setting alarms and sending texts.

The news comes as the smart home market becomes increasingly intertwined with cloud services and artificial intelligence-powered products. Amazon is leading the charge with its Alexa assistant and the Echo. And Google also announced its own AI assistant and home speaker; the assistant is called Google Assistant, while the speaker is Google Home, naturally. Apple has one strategic advantage: Siri is multilingual, while Alexa remains confined to the English-speaking US.

Still, Amazon has succeeded in the home in part because it openly lets Alexa connect to third-party apps and services, for hailing Uber rides, playing games, and performing all sorts of other tasks Amazon can't accomplish on its own. Google hasn't announced a similar SDK for the Home, but may do so later this year.

The takeaway there: these speakers and AI assistants are useless unless developers can help them do much more than their creators are capable of. The new Google Assistant is capable of answering follow-up questions, and it can also perform more complex tasks than Siri or Alexa. Right now, Siri tends to kick those types of queriers to Microsoft's Bing. For Apple to stay competitive in this space — and make up the substantial ground its ceded to its rivals — it has to make Siri more open and more powerful. From there, the company can try to bake it into a speaker customers may want to place in their living rooms.

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