Will the latest Apple HomePod defeat Amazon and Google?

January 23, Apple USA website announced that its smart speaker HomePod will be on sale on February 9. From this Friday, you can order from the Apple online store and physical store in United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom and it will also be launched this spring in France, Germany. At present, HomePod sells in the United States at the price $349.

Apple also revealed more details about HomePod's gesture control features such as Siri and music playback controls. Earlier, Apple confirmed that users can touch the top of the HomePod to play, pause, cut songs, adjust the volume, and long press to call Siri and other functions. When Siri is in command-listen status, there is a series of dynamic color LED waveforms flashing. Single touch to start playing or pause music, double-click to cut songs, triple-click to return to the previous song.

HomePod speaker is one of the new products Apple released at last year's WWDC conference, which is equipped with the A8 processor, including seven tweeters and a subwoofer, the top has 6 array microphone. This speaker is compatible with iPhone 5s and above, iPad Pro, iPad Air and above, iPad mini 2 and above, and iPod touch (6 generations) running iOS 11.2.5.

Competitors can not be ignored

Before Apple, Amazon and Google broke into the wave of smart speakers and formed a certain advantage. There are also fierce competitions from Chinese rivals like Xiaomi AI Smart Speaker and Ali TmallGenie. Smart speakers from China like the xiaomi ai speaker has the simply same advanced features at a relatively low price.

In November 2014, Amazon Echo announced. In June 2015, the speaker started its public sale and has already sold more than 20 million units by the Christmas shopping season in 2017. Just announced the postpone HomePod release, Amazon Echo also take advantage of the Christmas shopping season. The all-day-long Echo brings a revolution to the smart home. You just need to call the Echo assistant Alexa, you can control everything at home. Google's Smart Speaker Home has also been released for a year, and the built-in voice assistant response is also more flexible than Alexa. Google Home can also identify who is the speaker, and according to the speaker to provide different feedback.