FIRST there was Amazon Echo and then there was Google Home. But as Apple launches its HomePod this week, technology experts say that the battle being waged to bring artificial intelligence into our living rooms is now about to get serious. The fight to be the best home AI will be as bitter as the contest to dominate the mobile phone market.
Apple's HomePod follows in the footsteps of Amazon’s Echo and Google's Home AI devices - bringing owners music, news, weather reports, travel updates, trivia and podcast all with just a voice command. Owners of home AIs can order pizza to their door, set diary dates, find cinema times and have audio books read to them. Little wonder the AIs in your kitchen and living room are now known as 'the genie in the bottle' - as your wish is their command. AIs can also control connected devices and appliances, allowing a user to adjust home temperature and lighting, and turn various devices, like a kettle, on or off.
Apple's new HomePod is squaring up against its more established AI rival and making big claims in terms of both high audio quality and design. Powered by Apple’s digital helper Siri, its biggest competitor is the Amazon Echo - the original voice-activated speaker powered by digital assistant Alexa which hit the market in 2016. Google Home was launched later that year.
However the devices – which can effectively "listen in" to family life via the device's inbuilt microphone – have sparked fears over privacy. Others have raised notes of caution over the huge amount of data collected on users' preferences, which could be used for marketing purposes.
Despite this experts claim the addition of Apple's HomePod to the competitive artificial intelligence market this Friday, will be highly significant. While Alexa has won many hearts, Apple products attract extreme loyalty with fans camping outside stores for days in advance of launch of the latest iPhone in an attempt to be the first to get their hands on the coveted devices.
Alessandro Vinciarelli, professor of computer science at Glasgow University, said: "Apple is a company that can make significant investments and can count on some of the best minds in the world. When they enter a market, they can significantly improve the technology. This is particularly important in the case of speech interfaces because they 'learn' from the users how to map speech into suitable answers or actions."
He said the more users an AI has the better it 'learns' to interpret requests – Apple products typically attract a large number of users. Vinciarelli also pointed to evidence that Apple had managed to "penetrate our everyday life to unprecedented extents" with products including phones and tablets, although the Apple Watch has failed to catch on.
At present machines still have limitations, added Vinciarelli. "If a request is not particularly frequent – or it is expressed in a way that is ambiguous, metaphoric or it assumes implicit knowledge – the matching will not produce the expected results." He believes the technology is likely to improve dramatically in coming years.
Digital strategist Rob Blackie agreed that the launch of the Apple HomePod was "potentially huge". "Apple has got a track record of designing things that people are happy to have their hands on," he added. "What people say about Apple products is that they just work." He claimed Google has been "brilliant at developing software" while people like Amazon delivering their products to their home but neither company had as strong a track record as Apple of creating physical products, he argued.
"The issue of trust is also an important one and there are high levels of trust associated with the [Apple] brand. You are putting a microphone in your house that is permanently listening. Essentially there are massive opportunities for abuse there. Apple has been very good at privacy and most people trust it to do the right thing."
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