Aaron Miller:
The HomePod team set out—six years ago—to design a speaker. And not just any speaker. They wanted to make a really great speaker that only Apple could make, one with a brain that could adapt to its surroundings.
Miller pointed me to his post via Twitter and I think it’s a really good take on the disconnect I’ve been feeling regarding many HomePod reviews – “smart speaker vs smart assistant”.
I take Apple at its word that this is a “smart speaker” and I think that’s how it should be reviewed – “How does it sound/work as a speaker?” But so many are comparing it to the virtual assistants of Amazon and Google (where it justifiably pales in comparison).
After reading Miller’s piece, I think Apple may have made a marketing error in calling the HomePod a smart speaker. Reviewers are getting hung up on the “smart” part and assuming it means and is comparable to devices like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home. But what if we redefine smart? Think of the things almost all the reviewers have commented on regarding the HomePod as a standalone music player. The sound quality is universally described as excellent. The design of the internals is mindboggling. The technology for “forming sound” is beyond what anyone else is doing, certainly at this price point.
So, if you think of the HomePod as a speaker leaps and bounds beyond the “intelligence” of any other speaker, then it’s an amazing device. It’s definitely a “smart speaker”. But it’s not a particularly good virtual assistant. It wasn’t designed to be – at least not yet.
Maybe if Apple had called the HomePod a “super speaker” or something else and more directly avoided the comparison to “smart” devices like the Echo and the Home, they wouldn’t be having so many tech reviewers reviewing a Ferrari as if it were a Corolla.
I think they have painted themselves into a corner a bit. If they market the HP as a great speaker with smarts, what do they do if they get Siri and Homekit to the point where it really can compete well with Alexa in the smart home arena? HomePod Mini? Sure, but it won’t have the audio quality of the HP if it’s the size of the Dot, etc. Ignore the lower price point? That’s risky since it limits market penetration for Homekit. Cede the inexpensive voice device market? Again, risk.
They could, of course, simply say “look, if you are into all that smart home stuff you don’t need an extra device if you have an iPhone or iPad…” and be content with that sizeable chunk of the market.
I agree about setting expectations. They don’t do this as well as they once did and it leads to tech writers focusing on things that frankly aren’t that important.
Reading HomePod reviews reminded me of car reviews that write about a convertible, then go on and on about the lack of cargo space and it only seats two. Yeah…IT’S A CONVERTIBLE. We know.
I wonder if HomePod’s assistant was called Deejay and Apple TV’s was called something like Ebert, this would remove a lot of the expectation that a streaming jukebox should update my To Do list or a TV box should answer math questions.
It’s reasonable for the consumer to expect consistency when everything suggests Siri on HomePod is the same as Siri on Apple TV and Siri on iPhone. Apple is creating this problem and it feels damaging to the general view of Siri and perhaps eventually Apple. They need to communicate their big vision for voice assistants because it’s clearly different from Amazon’s and Google’s and a lot of the tech reviewers. Spell it out.
Another part of the problem is how infrequently they even talk about Siri at WWDC. Someone needs to be official Siri point person and go up on stage every year and do 10 minutes on how Siri has been improved and how developers can take advantage of it.
What you just said echoes something I wrote about recently: the fact that Siri is NOT a single entity, despite the way Apple speaks of the technology. And it’s not only becoming a problem in terms of expectations, it’s actually keeping the ecosystem from becoming much stronger. If Siri on HomePod and Apple TV was the same Siri we get on iOS, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I’d be very curious to know the technical limitations behind the fragmentation. I’m certainly having trouble understanding it in light of the competition.
If using smarts to make the speaker sound better, than old Sonos with TruePlay would qualify. There have been self-tuning* home theater systems for over a decade, but no one was calling them “smart speakers” back then. If you’re going to say that “self-tuning” is what makes a speaker smart, you should have done it for years, rather than waiting until Apple gets into the market. Otherwise it sounds like special pleading for a specific company.
Too many reviewers appear to be prone to the same errors of reasoning that even more of their readers commit: that of conflating unrelated issues with sloppy rhetoric.
And yes, Apple could do better at defining the conversation they want to have with potential customers.
I suspect the limitations/fragmentation may have something to do with hardware capabilities. Didn’t
Apple say there is processing done on-device, before sending Apple’s way, encrypted and anonymized?
<
blockquote>Google gives all people 98 US dollars per-hour to complete small jobs staying at home .. Work Some just few hours in a whole day and enjoy more time together with your family … any individual can also avail it!!!this Thursday I bought a great new Audi Quattro after just making $6393 this last month .it is absolutely my favourite-work however you could no longer forgive yourself if you do not read it.!tg63l:=>=>=> http://GoogleRealOnlineFreelanceWorks/earncash/$98/hourly… ♥♥♥b♥♥♥l♥♥t♥♥b♥r♥♥v♥♥♥o♥♥b♥♥♥p♥♥s♥c♥♥q♥j♥♥q♥♥♥e♥♥v♥m♥♥♥c♥r♥r♥♥p♥♥k♥g♥o♥♥m:::::!vh533u:wkyuk