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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.
...is now limited to bonzais and flower pots only.
Dialectician. Archology.
...forward anything it hears to a permanent, centralized store to be forever associated with you and rescanned on a regular basis to mine new information. Just like any of these devices.
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.
So I assume Tindal is the abomination resulted from the marriage of Tinder and Tidal? What does it do? You get to Tindal and chill when you swipe right on the same playlist?
Oddly, Ford parts don't fit into my Chevy either!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
What it can do though, is priceless.
-It comes in a nice shiny case
-It comes in any color you like, so long as it's "Apple White"
-It has an Apple Logo
-It "just works"(tm), for a very limited definition of works.
It is AirPlay compatible, so it will work with any app that supports Airplay (including Android). It also works with iCloud Match. Works great, and sound great! You should buy two.
This just continues the tradition of other, similar gimmicks: beyond grins and giggles, and party games, their usefulness is very limited. What they can do, you can, for the most part, do just as efficiently with a keyboard. On the other hand, there are lots of tasks that you can do very easily with a keyboard, that seem to be beyond their grasp. Finally, they understand very, very little - command any of them NOT to give you the weather forecast for the weekend, and it will, unhesitatingly, give you the weather forecast for the weekend. These things will one day no doubt be very useful; for the time being, they are just toys, and not very entertaining ones, at that.
The HomePod exists solely as a placeholder product for Apple to position themselves in the home assistant market, for the large pool of buyers already commited to the Apple brand - not much unlike the Apple TV, the Mac Mini, the MacBook Air, among others. Apple has a history of taking long to get in the game because when they do get in the game, they have their name to make it sell, then just market that specific characteristic as being reason for everything else being better. "When we decide to enter a segment, we do it with the best product/feature polish available".
The only difference being that, this time around, it is oh-so-much easier to make the device un-interoperable with third parties. The only interaction with such a device is sound - people just won't notice many of the flaws, on a system which's user experience is minimized to spoken or aloud interaction. or to a level, will excuse them much more easily. It's a lot like the Kindle Fire devices - make one device for exacty 2 or 3 features (buy ebook, read ebook, keep it closed to Amazon's ecosystem for experience/quality assurance "purposes", which are simply euphemisms for monetization), and make those solid enough so you can tell people they can do them instead of using "brand X" of the same feature. Maybe some time after you can add a browser or other non-trivialities that should have been there in the first place, but were simply too expensive or would take too long to produce. Macs moving to Intel and finally supporting Windows comes to mind...
“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame”
- Slashdot
and always-on Microphones are now "Speakers" -- huzzah.
The next version, which will come out next year will tout amazing new features - all of which will have been available in other products for years, but which Apple will pretend are revolutionary new ideas they came up with. Apple fans who bought Version 1 will line up to buy Version 2 so they don't get left behind.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
5. HomePod can't hook up to another device using an auxiliary cord.
It have a lot of courage!|
Elok
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!
But not when they are connected back to the mother ships.
Stand alone, fire walled, etc. NO communication back to anyone one. No logs, except those kept locally.
Unfortunately, I believe these all still rely heavily on the Hardware and Databases back at the mother ships.
Unless these devices can stand on their own or there is some iron clad Federal regulation on privacy of data (with jail time for violators), not happening in my home.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Agreed. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but I recognise that they have been a force for innovation in the industry. (And I would argue that the existence of competition is good for Apple too, do we think iOS would have half of the features it has without Android around?) The last thing we should want, whether you buy their stuff or not, is them losing their way. Unfortunately that seems to be what's happening.
I've been waiting to hear that it isn't compatible with iTunes Home Sharing either (streaming from iTunes on your LAN). They have already created an in-home streaming solution, but they would be the first to allow it from a smart speaker. Everyone requires your music to be on a cloud service.
It's just one more nail in the coffin before it even hits a ship date.
It is AirPlay compatible. Therefore it is compatible with iTunes (including your local music Library and Apple Music), AppleTV, Macs, iPads, several AV Receivers, etc.
Then these clearly are not products targeted at you. All the best functionality of these devices relies on communication back to the "mother ships". Asking for the latest news, weather, sports scores, streaming music, etc... Explain to me how something firewalled on your local network would be able to do any of that.
It's just wearisome to hear these same comments trotted out every time a smart speaker is discussed on the site.
I have a Pixel, she has a recent iPhone model. Very occasionally we still ask siri a question, to see if she's up to answering a question, but mostly to see if anything has improved. Basically we use Ok Google for everything.
We've always been really impressed with Ok Google's question answering capabilities, from odd ways to ask the weather to the color of a specific type of bird, cooking instructions etc etc. Siri just chokes on 99% of questions. Alexa will generally get the words right and tell you it can't search for XYZ but at least it gets that right.
At this point we would consider a google or possibly an Alexa device (my girlfriend likes it's integration with our Fire TV, amazon orders, etc) but we both agree that Siri is Completely Fucking Useless. If we're waiting for an uber to go home some times we'll amuse ourselves to see how badly Siri mangles our request. Siri's basically just a first generation toy, whereas Ok Google is almost to the point where you could go voice-only for performing 95% of your daily searches. Alexa fits somewhere in the middle but closer to google than apple's offerings.
moox. for a new generation.
Talking to Apple, logging queries, etc., is not the same as querying the web.
If I could ask a question or have some task performed and there be no record what-so-ever at the "mother ship", then I'd go for it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They could switch on the lights, change the temperature etc. without leaving traces outside of the home.
You should be able to set up DuckDuckGo as your search engine without the Q&A's being read by the manufacturer.
With proper (I.e. non USofA) privacy regulation this could all be feasible, you could even order a pizza or dildo with only you and the seller keeping records.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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.
But does it blend?
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.
A connection to the mother ship is the only reason those devices exist. your use case for them is pretty much just ancillary to their goals. (machine learning training and advertising)
I have a Google Home, and was shocked to discover it can't access my Google Calendar! I have a G Suite (Google Apps) account, and apparently for "security" they disallow access to G Suite calendars from Home. Which is weird because apparently Alexa has no trouble with it at all. Hundreds of messages on the Google Home support forum: https://productforums.google.c...