Apple's HomeView Has Alexa In Its Sights

If you can look beyond the fact that this could be a Daily Objects Node charger juicing up an Apple Watch core, behold the new Apple HomeView. A product category that Apple has been rumoured to get into for years now, during which time, the Amazon Echo Show has established itself as a curious sous chef in kitchens world wide.

But like all things Apple, its biggest advantage is something no other home appliance brand replicate. The backbone of the HomeView is the way it talks to up to six family members, remembers them and all their conversations from their own Apple devices such as Macs, iPhones or Watches. HomeView recognises up to six faces and gives each person a personal home screen, showing Messages and Calendar only when the enrolled person is recognised and their paired iPhone or iPad is nearby and recently unlocked. Apple has clearly one-upped the competition when it comes to privacy, encryption and customisation for specific family members.

The hardware is reminiscent of the iMac G4 with its articulated hinge, but holds a 7-inch Liquid Retina display, putting out 500 nits of brightness and sits on a stainless-steel hinge above a domed aluminium base. The dome itself serves as the speaker system featuring two full-range drivers in the display plus a down-firing woofer and two passive radiators, tuned by computational audio. It runs on Apple's A18 chip which should give it the navigation speed and graphical chops as good as an iPhone but its sole objective is to ensure that the much touted Siri AI experience is seamless.

So the harder question is can Siri beat Alexa+ as a smart assistant, especially in the Indian context. Amazon's Echo Show 11 is Rs 26,999 so Apple is asking roughly Rs 13,000 more. Alexa+ arrived here in September in Hindi and English, and lets you switch languages mid-sentence and it even understands Indian phrasing such as "dhai baje." Its partner list reads like a busy Saturday night too, with Swiggy, District, MakeMyTrip, TripAdvisor and EazyDiner ready to tango, plus grocery orders through Amazon Now. Some of those integrations are coming soon, but music already covers Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music and JioSaavn.

Siri AI may look thinner on the ground since it has launched only in English for now and neither has Apple announced any Indian service partnerships for HomeView yet. But with most of the complex requests and third-party apps running from a nearby iPhone, Apple may have an ace up its sleeve. Where Siri wins is intelligence that knows you. Requests are processed on-device or in Private Cloud Compute, which Apple says doesn't store data or make it accessible to anyone.

The biggest reason to buy one is that its a single shared screen that behaves like a phone for each family member, without exposing anyone's messages to the rest of the household. It can be bought in a wall-mount configuration or the traditional speaker base and I do wish Apple would’ve included a camera and mic based voice locator so it would turn itself automatically to whoever is speaking to it.

So will HomeView usurp the Echo? Not across India's mass market, where Alexa's lower price, Hindi and Prime bundle will keep winning. But in iPhone-heavy homes, the ones willing to spend Rs 40,000 on a speaker, Amazon should be nervous.