HomePod Will Soon Be Obsolete as Companion Robots Become Popular
The Apple HomePod and other intelligent speakers will soon be obsolete. Here’s why. The Robots are coming.
Intelligent speakers like Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s HomePod and Google Home are just the first wave of little devices that are internet connected and can chat with us. Because they’re about the size of a coffee can, or smaller, they aren’t very complicated.
Mayfield Robotics Kuri
That’s a sensible way to get customers hooked on the technology at a modest cost.
But technology always evolves. Developers get their feet wet with some basic aspects of the technology, like voice recognition, while other more challenging aspects, say, mobility are held back while R&D continues. Just as we’ve seen from Apple, a well planned infrastructure leads to new capabilities down the road.
The logical extension of the intelligent speaker and its infrastructure is the robot companion.
HomePod Growth, then Decline
But wait. Dan Moren argues that the HomePod is just getting started. “Apple’s smart speaker has plenty of room to grow.” And he’s right. The capabilities of the HomePod will expand rapidly, just as we’ve seen with the Apple Watch in the last three years.
And yet, in parallel, there is a technology that I believe will eventually subsume these smart speakers. It’s the home companion robot. For some background, see: “Family Robot Companions Are Evolving Fast, Will Soon Be Common.” There, I wrote:
These robots don’t have to bring a giant bag of dog food in from the truck or carry the laundry upstairs. Instead, they just have to be cute, alert, expressive, good listeners, good companions and, most of all, affordable….
…Modest hardware, very fast processors, an internet connection, machine learning and AI software will play an extraordinary role if they’re fused together with a crisp vision and smart engineering. They’ll make the currently, in vogue, intelligent speakers seem like the 8-track tapes we dumped into the closet years ago.
When you think about the design of an intelligent speaker, it’s missing some essentials that customers will soon long for. It’s immobile, so it can’t do scouting and do remote-controlled telepresence. Some speakers have cameras, but you’d need one in every room. These speakers are not very expressive. The don’t connect with us via warmth and touch.
Who, being on crutches after a skiing accident, wants to sit next to a little brick all day. It’s not great companionship. Companion robots, with advanced designs for human interaction, will easily supercede smart speakers.
While a companion robot like Kuri doesn’t yet carry on a conversation, I’ll bet it’s coming. And when it does, our little smart speaker bricks will start to feel like the early Personal Digital Assistants that were made obsolete by the modern smartphone.
The future belongs to expressive, cuddly, emotive, mobile companion robots like Kuri (and, of course R2-D2) and not plastic speakers on a bookshelf.
Next Page: The News Debris For The Week of February 19th. Apple’s annoying OS antics.
Page 2 – News Debris For The Week of February 19th
Apple’s Annoying OS Antics
• One of the annoying things that Apple does is to introduce new features in its OSes that look attractive for many but don’t meet the needs of many others. Or have implications that are problematic. And that feature is turned on by default in a fit of naive glee (with implicit psychological pressure) that everyone both understands and needs this glitzy feature. Here’s just one more example I ran across this week from Kirk McElhearn. “The Latest macOS Update Does This, and It’s Not a Good Idea.”
In other cases, Apple could build in warnings not to do certain things, (or just block dangerous actions) but instead lets the user make a bad mistake because the structure of the human interface doesn’t suggest a red alert or natural kind of warning. Here’s an example of that by Glenn Fleishman. “Another warning: Don’t convert your Time Machine volume from HFS+ to APFS.”
These two examples help explain why there is often a feeling of mild, seething frustration and disappointment with the latest versions of macOS.
My own constant disappointment is the silly, pointless, animated, graphic that macOS shows as it finishes stetting up an upgraded OS. How about actually telling us something useful? It’s insulting in the extreme.
Treating users like idiots,
More Debris
Related
• Two weeks ago, I wrote: “The Fight For Net Neutrality Accelerates, Invokes New Tactics.” Later, on TMO Daily, I surmised that the Telecom giants probably wouldn’t rush into violations of the spirit of neutrality for legal reasons and public relations considerations. That prediction looks like a good one. “The FCC’s net neutrality rules end in April, but 18 ISPs promise to stay honest.”
• In the past, there was a lot of discussion about Apple’s entry into both eBooks and autonomous cars. In time, we moved on to other topics, but these industries have continued on, under our radar. Here’s a quick update on how those two industries are faring from the perspective of the survivability of Barnes & Noble and the ability of Tesla to meet its massive backlog for the Model 3. (Did you plunk down a $1,000 deposit on March 31, 2016?)
• Just how well is Apple Pay doing? Loup Ventures has just published a report that tells an interesting story of mixed success. “Annual Apple Pay Review: Adoption Jumps, But Still A Long Way To Go.”
• Finally, what might be in store for us in iOS 12? Jonny Evans at Apple Must has some interesting ideas. See: “What are we expecting (and not expecting) in iOS 12?” He even extends his crystal ball to a few tantalizing items for iOS 13.
As Stephen Bishop sang, “On and On.”
Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the TMO headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holiday weeks.
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