Apple Partner Sparks Speculation on Possible Future HomePod with Face ID

The iPhone X frenzy may have made us forget, but it is worth remembering that Apple is just weeks away from entering a whole new market: HomePodAfter all, it will be the company's first incident in the (already hot enough) segment of the smart speakers when it is launched next month. But about him, we already know almost everything, so we talk about the possible future instead?

The speculation of the time courtesy of Nikkei, which, in today's matter, quotes the president of Inventec Appliances, David Ho. Inventec is one of Apple's partners in setting up HomePod (the other is Foxconn) and Ho, at the company's latest earnings conference, talked a little about the prospects for the segment.

We see trends in which engineers are designing smart speakers that will not only come with voice recognition, but will also incorporate features such as face and image recognition. () These Artificial Intelligence related features will be used to make people's lives more convenient and make the product easier to operate.

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

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

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

via MacRumors