SMART HOME ASSISTANT
Amazon and Google grabbed the headlines with their voice-assistant devices, but Apple is striking back with its new HomePod speaker
Supercharged Siri with awesome sound
Apple has had its eye on home-automation for a long time. Siri was able to control lights, thermostats and other home devices long before the Amazon Echo and Google Home got in on the act. Yet it’s been Amazon and Google that have grabbed all the headlines recently – until, that is, Apple announced its new HomePod speaker system at its World Wide Developers Conference in June. So how was it that Apple found itself on the back foot in this important new market?
At a fundamental level, Siri, Google Home, and Alexa on the Amazon Echo all work in very similar ways. You speak to them – perhaps asking about the weather, playing some music on Spotify, or telling them to turn off your living room lights – and your voice commands are shunted across the Internet to a server at Apple, Amazon or Google. Those servers translate your voice commands, and then prompt your device to respond with the required information or actions.
There are some differences in emphasis – Google Home can draw on the vast power of the Google search engine to root out even the most obscure snippets of information, while the Echo can plug into Amazon’s global sales network and send a drone to air-lift a pizza to your front door in 30 seconds flat. And Siri works well with other iOS apps on your iPhone, allowing you to quickly dictate and send an email or text message, or create a reminder or to-do list. But, in all three
HomeKit allows multiple devices to work together, allowing you to set up scenes
cases, the basic process of translating and responding to your voice commands works in the same manner.
Siri in a box
However, the way that this technology is presented to people varies, and you have to give Amazon credit for making the first move with its Echo speaker, which was first unveiled back in 2014. The Amazon Echo – and the recently launched Google Home – are very easy to use. They’re simple, self-contained devices that just sit on a shelf or coffee table so that they can listen out for commands. But, until now, Siri has really just been restricted to your iPhone – which in turn, lives primarily in your pocket. Siri was never a distinct, self-contained product, like the Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers. And Siri was most certainly not designed to stay at home and be shared with others. That’s why Apple launched the HomePod. In fact, it admitted as much when CEO Tim Cook said – “we have a great portable music experience. But what about the home?” He and VP Phil Schiller talked a lot about the great ‘spacious sound’ of the HomePod speaker, and how you can use Siri to control Apple Music and playlists. And, of course, you can use Siri on the HomePod to check the weather, sports results and other information – just as you already do with Siri on the iPhone. But the HomePod’s secret weapon isn’t just Siri. Right at the end of his HomePod demo, Schiller casually mentioned that the HomePod has a built-in ‘HomeKit base’. Forget all that marketing talk about “we love music” – that HomeKit base is what the HomePod is really all about.
HomeKit is the software that Apple developed specifically in order to control lights, heating and other home appliances. The great strength of HomeKit – and the Home app that was introduced with iOS 10 – is that it allows you to link multiple devices so that they work together (but only if those devices are all compatible with HomeKit). The Home app gives you the ability to create ‘scenes’ that trigger a number of actions or devices all at the same time. You could, for instance, create a ‘bedtime’ scene that automatically turns off all your downstairs lights and central heating when you go to bed at night – and maybe a ‘wake-up’ scene that
turns everything back on in the morning.
There’s a problem here, though. The Home app on your iPhone can’t do that all by itself. You can use it to control individual devices, such as telling Siri to turn your lights on or off. But if you want to use ‘scenes’ to control the lights and heating together then – at the moment – you need an AppleTV or an iPad that can act as a ‘HomeKit base’ and link those devices together for you.
Unfortunately, the AppleTV has never been a big hit, and – like the iPhone – people tend to carry their iPads around with them, which meant that Apple hasn’t had a central home device that could sit in your living room and compete with the Amazon Echo and Google Home.
So, this December, the HomePod effectively presses the reset button on Apple’s plans for home automation. It’s ‘game on’ once more, and it’ll be fascinating to watch the titanic battle as Apple, Amazon and Google slug it out for control of the Apple Home of the future.