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Things Apple's $350 HomePod Smart-Speaker Can't Do: Answer Random Questions, Check Calendar, Work With an Android Phone, and More (businessinsider.com)
In June last year, Apple announced the HomePod, its first smart-speaker which will battle Amazon's sleeper hit Echo speakers and Google's Home speakers. Apple being late to enter a product category is nothing new, but the HomePod has a few other strange things about it. Apple said it won't begin shipping the HomePod until December that year, in a departure of its own tradition. Then the device's shipment was delayed till "early 2018" -- February 9 is the current shipping date. Bloomberg has reported about the difficulties Apple engineers faced over the years to come up with the HomePod.
At any rate, Business Insider now has more information about the device, and is reporting the things that Apple's first smart-speaker won't be able to do. From the report (condensed): 1. HomePod can't pair with Android phones.
2. HomePod doesn't recognize different people's voices.
3. HomePod can't check your calendar.
4. HomePod doesn't work well with other streaming services besides Apple Music. (Spotify, Tindal, and Pandora users won't be able to use Siri.)
5. HomePod can't hook up to another device using an auxiliary cord.
6. HomePod can't make calls on its own. (In order to make a call using HomePod, you have to dial the person's number on your iPhone, then manually select that the call play through HomePod.)
7. The HomePod version of Siri isn't prepared to answer random questions like Alexa and Google Assistant.
At any rate, Business Insider now has more information about the device, and is reporting the things that Apple's first smart-speaker won't be able to do. From the report (condensed): 1. HomePod can't pair with Android phones.
2. HomePod doesn't recognize different people's voices.
3. HomePod can't check your calendar.
4. HomePod doesn't work well with other streaming services besides Apple Music. (Spotify, Tindal, and Pandora users won't be able to use Siri.)
5. HomePod can't hook up to another device using an auxiliary cord.
6. HomePod can't make calls on its own. (In order to make a call using HomePod, you have to dial the person's number on your iPhone, then manually select that the call play through HomePod.)
7. The HomePod version of Siri isn't prepared to answer random questions like Alexa and Google Assistant.
This feels like Apple did this product simply to have something out there. I hate to say it, but Jobs would of NEVER allowed this product to go out unless it was as good or better than the competition.
My wife bought me an Amazon Echo Dot for my birthday (despite me not only not wanting one but expressing uneasiness with having a speaker listening in on us all the time). Her opinion was that I could have it in the kitchen reading recipes to me while I cooked. Our usage of it was as follows:
First Day: We asked a bunch of questions and started Googling funny things we could ask Echo. The kids got involved and had a blast asking her various things.
Second Day - End of First Week: My wife used it to play music while I was at work.
After First Week: It got unplugged and hasn't been used since. (Except, perhaps, for one or two times when we remembered about it, plugged it in, and used it for an hour or two before unplugging it again.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This feels like Apple did this product simply to have something out there.
Probably true but the real question is how fast they will iterate and improve it. The original iPhone was a game changer but the first version didn't include a lot of features their competition had at the time. It succeeded on the improvements of later versions. There were MP3 players that were better than the iPod when it was introduced. Apple rarely is first into a market but they usually come with something decent and then keep improving it until it gains major market share. I recommend people never buy version 1.0 of a new Apple product because it takes them a few tries to work out the kinks even if they have the broad strokes more or less right.
hate to say it, but Jobs would of NEVER allowed this product to go out unless it was as good or better than the competition.
Jobs did exactly that with some regularity. Apple products are generally good quality but often are not best in class and more than a few have been quite deficient. Apple has some big hits but they aren't anywhere close to a perfect batting average even when Jobs was in charge.
The world isn't black and white: there are also those that are not in the Apple garden, and have no intention of going in there, but see Apple as a useful foil to help keep the likes of Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. at least slightly honest, competetive and innovative. I might not have or want any of Apple's products in my life, but I don't want them to slowly fade slowly back into the relative niche obscurity they had in the late 1990s and early 2000s either. While that's obviously not going to happen any time soon thanks to their huge cash reserves, launching technically lame and overpriced products compared to the competition like this are not exactly going to help.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
We have 3 Echo devices and 1 Google device in the house. They are all the dot/mini versions. The Echos are in the kitchen, garage, and bathroom and the Google device is in the bedroom. The Echo is a great companion in the kitchen for setting timers, doing unit conversions, and getting basic info from calendars and the weather. In the bathroom and garage it's just a nice way to control music hands free. The Google device is far more capable and I'd swap them all to Google except the three Amazon ones are plugged into real speakers via the headphone jack whereas the Google one stupidly leaves out this feature. As such we mostly just use the Google one to control the Chromecast plugged into the TV and occasionally for calendar/weather/traffic functions.
As far as capabilities, using Alexa is like using DOS. Totally useless unless you know the right commands. Google's is like a voice search engine. You can ask it the most random of questions and it never ceases to amaze me in the answers it comes up with. It "understands" general questions better and allows you to refine and build upon previous queries. As far as the devices listening to bedroom activities (Google) and bathroom activities (Amazon), I could care less. Amazon can listen to me shit all day and I don't care and Google has far more embarrassing stuff on me in gmail and search history than any sounds I make in bed.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
You're assuming nobody is handicapped in any way, and forgetting that people have strokes, aneurysms and car accidents.
A partially paralyzed auto accident survivor facing a grueling years-long recovery process is usually very willing to talk to a computer. Not least for streaming music - "Alexa, play 'Live from the Mars Hotel'" - while engaged in difficult or humiliating processes essential to therapy.
I wish these things had been available while my father was in the last stages of Parkinson's disease. Amazon Alexa would have enriched his life immeasurably.
These all do the speech recognition in the cloud at the moment (AFAIK). That part will need done there until it can be moved to a higher-powered local device, and it's debatable whether or not that's completely feasible today (I think it probably is, since I could do speech recognition in realtime on an old 200MHz x86 cpu, though the current state of the art is better).
That said, none of items you noted require communication through a single broker (ie. Amazon's Alexa sending all queries through Alexa; Google sending all queries through their service; etc etc).
I'm most familiar with Amazon's Alexa. It already has "skills", which are 3rd party things that it can tie into. The skills get the text version of the request, and reply with their own string of text, which gets sent back down to the speaker and spoken. If the speech-to-text was done locally, that communication to and from the skills could be done directly. Skills could be created for each of those items you noted (news, weather, sports scores, music, etc)... there are already more advances skills in place, so that's not the issue.
The only hurdle right now is that the speech-to-text is done server-side ("in the cloud"). That is by design, and at least partially to aid in lock in (prevents the devices from being used without their service). Since that's done on the server, managing all the 3rd party skills and that communication is also far easier to do server-side, so that's how it was implemented... but that's just a side effect, and is not a direct limitation.