Virtual personal assistants are everywhere these days. Google Now was Google's way of developing a predictive personal assistant so that you wouldn't have to keep digging through your e-mails for reminders, set up RSS feeds, or search through Google Maps for traffic on your daily commute. This proved to be much more useful than Apple's Siri at the time, but it was only half of the puzzle for Google. Amazon created Alexa and began shipping its wildly popular Echo devices, then Microsoft came out with Cortana, and now Google has come full circle with the Google Assistant and the Google Home.
Many people really enjoy the idea of having their own virtual personal assistant as a stationary device and this made Amazon's Echo products quite successful. Amazon's dedication towards including the massive amount of 3rd-party skills for the device has also helped it gain a lead in the market. Google Home was released to compete in that space and it's doing fairly well with the ability to tap into Google's massive search engine knowledge graph.
Back in May of last year, The Information reported that Apple was wanting to get in on the fun too. There wasn't much details to go on at the time other than the device would have a speaker, a microphone, and being Siri-based – nothing you wouldn't expect to see on a home assistant device. There wasn't much talk about the news since then, but last month there was a new rumor that sparked people's interest. This new rumor came from leaker Sonny Dickson who tweeted that Apple was "finalising designs for their Alexa competitor."
He said it was to be marketed as a "Siri/AirPlay device" and is said to include some sort of Beats by Dre technology. Now yesterday, it was reported by MacRumors that an "often-reliable Apple analyst" felt there was more than a "50% chance" that Apple would be announcing this product next month at the WWDC event. The analyst expects the device to have a woofer and seven tweeters, computing power similar to the iPhone 6/6s, and will be positioned for the high-end market as a better entertainment experience and higher price than the Amazon Echo.
Source: MacRumors
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