Manjoo of the NYT describes Apple's new product HomePod which is similar to the Amazon Echo, a smart speaker that has inside it a Amazon virtual assistant. The price tag of $349 is twice that of the Echo.
Manjoo says the surround sound is better and can be customized to the room you are in, though from a distance Echo works better. Apple is now building its capabilities in the cloud services and artificial intelligence field to do better than Amazon in the home assistant product segment. This will help Apple make its personal assistant Siri handle requests better, in many languages. This is a part of the transformation at Apple as it shifts from focus on hardware to focus on "deep learning," and " machine learning.," fields that are now considered transformative.
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