Apple HomePod speaker is a cute little home assistant

Apple is really rocking it at WWDC this year with all these new products and software updates, and one of the most interesting products that were announced is this cute little speaker; the Apple HomePod, powered by Siri.

With its simple cute design, it looks like a soft cocoon that you’d hug before you sleep; this Siri-powered home Assistant comes with seven tweeters placed at the bottom, one 4 inch woofer, and 7 microphones placed around the top. The A8 chip used in the making is supposed to provide both noise-cancelling and automatic equalization, this chip will adjust the EQ settings according to the room size and shape, providing the best sound quality the speaker can give.

This cute thing will light up once you say the magic words “Hey, Siri” and it’ll be able to do all kinds of Siri-ish stuff after that, scheduling tasks, playing music, searching the web and so on, although the top of the device lights up in a waveform-shaped light -just like the ones Siri uses in the iPhone- these lights are not an LCD and cannot be used to display other than the cool waveform.

The two things that Apple focused on while presenting the Apple HomePod were, first; the compatibility with Apple Music with the ability to connect all Apple devices in a multi-room sound system, this means that Apple plans to take Sonos up for a little challenge in the near future.

The other thing was security, Apple has always been trustworthy when it comes to their users’ data security, and this time they gave one big announcement about their new home assistant, it won’t record anything until the user says the wake-up word “Hey, Siri” and even after that, all the recorded data will be encrypted while transferred, plus the extra step that wasn’t explained thoroughly; the “Encrypted Siri-ID” that will be used to identify devices. All these security related details were probably revealed after the concerns raised after discovering that most home assistants are always recording voice input from users.