Apple partner sparks speculation about possible future HomePod with Face ID

Apple's outsourced listen to private conversations by Siri, according to one of them

The iPhone X frenzy may have made us forget, but it is healthy to remember that Apple is just weeks away from entering a whole new market: the HomePodafter all, it will be the company’s first foray into the (already quite heated) segment of smart speakers when it launches next month. But about him, we already know almost everything – so how about talking about the possible future instead?

The current speculation is courtesy of Nikkei, who, in today’s article, quotes the President of the Inventec Appliances, David Ho. Inventec is one of Apple’s partners in assembling the HomePod (the other is Foxconn) and Ho, at the company’s last results conference, spoke a little about the prospects for the segment.

We see trends where engineers are designing smart speakers that will not only come with speech recognition, but will also incorporate features like facial and image recognition. […] These resources related to Artificial Intelligence will be used to make people’s lives more convenient and make the product easier to operate.

Ho’s words, while not specifically citing Apple, give a clue as to what Apple may be planning, and the reasons are not few: in addition to Cupertino having fully embraced facial recognition technologies recently, with the iPhone X, Inventec does not manufacture smart speakers for many companies – apart from Apple, only Only U.S and other smaller companies that don’t have as deep technological aspirations as Tim Cook and his gang.

Consulted by Nikkei, analyst Jeff Pu of Yuanta Investment Consulting said that Apple could launch HomePods with facial recognition as early as 2019 – perhaps in a second generation of the product?

Anyway, these are just speculations. Before that, Apple needs to confirm the release date of the first speaker version and prove to the world that it knows how to make successful audio equipment – the previous attempt, as we well know, did not go very well.

via MacRumors