There's a 50/50 Chance Apple's Siri-Based Speaker Arrives at WWDC
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes there’s an “over 50 percent chance” Apple will unveil a Siri-based speaker at next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). This news comes just days after Apple blogger Sonny Dickson said that Cupertino was “finalizing designs for their Alexa competitor, expected to be marketed as a Siri/AirPlay device.”
As first noted by MacRumors, Kuo’s latest research note says the long-rumored Siri-based speaker could have “excellent acoustics performance” due to the device’s one woofer and seven tweeters.
Last week, Dickson said the speaker may feature a Mac Pro-like concave top with built-in controls.
Kuo explains:
We believe there is an over 50% chance that Apple will announce its first home AI product at WWDC in June and start selling in 2H17 in order to compete with the new Amazon Echo models to be launched in 2H17.
Rumors about a Siri-powered speaker being developed started spreading in 2016. In February 2017, however, Time’s Tim Bajarin said that Apple was no longer interested in developing a speaker. Instead, Cupertino was “more interested in turning Siri into an omnipresent AI assistant across devices, rather than designing a single device specifically to serve as a Siri machine.”
The WWDC keynote address begins at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday, June 5.
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