Amazon’s Echo speaker has been the surprise hit of the past couple of years, taking the awfully fragmented smart home tech market and giving everyone a central device to communicate with. Its popularity has prompted plenty of copycats, and a new Bloomberg report indicates that Apple is stepping up its own efforts to offer a competitor. An Echo-like device, built around Apple’s Siri voice assistant software, is said to have left the R&D stage and entered prototype testing inside Apple’s labs.
Apple has already laid much of the groundwork for creating what we might call a Siri speaker, having opened up Siri to third-party developers and also made it available on macOS computers as well as mobile iOS devices. The next logical step is...
via The Verge
