When it comes to stock trading involving tech stocks, one of the major factors influencing decisions is how innovative are the tech company's new product launches. That sparks off discussions between investors and raises stock value as a result ofthe perceived potential of the products in increasing the company's income.
Smart speakers are now the rage with tech giants. If Amazon's ($AMZN) ground-breaking Echo speaker and Google's ($GOOGL) Home Speaker were not advanced enough, the battle is further heating up with Apple ($AAPL) revealing its HomePod at the 2017 World Wide Developer Conference.
Powered by Siri
The HomePod is powered by the Siri voice assistant. That's in line with Microsoft's ($MSFT) smart speaker, Invoke, which was announced in May 2017 and is powered by the Cortana voice assistant. Seven inches tall, HomePod has a four-inch woofer along with six microphones plus a beam-forming tweeter. It's all covered in an attractive acoustic mesh.
Apple has come late to the party, with Amazon's Echo launched three years ago and Google's Home Speaker released six months back. But the Siri voice assistant powering the HomePod has been launched way back in 2011 through its iPhone 4S, so Apple is partly using technology that has already been perfected.
Total Home Assistant
HomePod can give you weather information and news while keeping you updated with the sports scores. It can also carry out a range of other tasks which users can dictate using the Siri voice assistant. The entire speaker can be your personal assistant. All commands given by users should begin with "Hey Siri". Only when the "Hey Siri" voice command is issued will the played audio be recorded or added to Apple's cloud. But that's not all. The A8 chip processor powering it is the same one you'll find in the iPhone 6.
With these attractive features, $AAPL has a great tool to ensure users remain on Apple's ecosystem. But the question is how much it can surpass Amazon and Google. It's hard to say, because the HomePod will set you back by $349, which is significantly more than double the cost of Google Home which is priced at only $129 and nearly double the $179 it costs for the Amazon Echo.
However, all Apple products are priced significantly higher and this smart speaker is really advanced. It has six microphones, and though Echo has more with seven, Google Home only has two. With six microphones, the HomePod can capture commands given by the user from anywhere in the room. All the user needs to do is address the device as "Hey Siri".
It's worth waiting and seeing what the impact of the HomePod will be on Apple, but it has certainly managed to generate the buzz in the stock market.
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