Apple’s Echo Competitor Rumored To Feature Facial Recognition

It was rumored earlier this week that Apple is working on a new product not unlike Amazon Echo. The smart home product is reportedly going to be powered by Siri and it’s expected to be unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference next month. A new report claims that this product will be quite superior to its rival as it’s going to have support for facial recognition.

Amazon may have kicked things off with the Echo and later expanded the product lineup, but other companies have started to take note of the potential that these devices have. A couple of weeks ago, Google unveiled the Google Home, a similar product that puts the company’s intelligent search assistant at the heart of it all.

According to the report, Apple’s device is going to be “self-aware,” meaning that it will be able to use facial recognition to tell who is in the room. It will then pull up that person’s preferences so that the lighting and music are just the way they like it.

While the report doesn’t mention if the camera inside the product could be used for home surveillance as well, it’s easy to see that it could be a possible use case for this device as well, but it may not be something that privacy advocates will warm up to initially.

Still, it’s early days, and since Apple hasn’t confirmed anything yet we can’t really be sure if the company really intends to come out with this product. We’ll find out for sure at WWDC 2016 next month.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Apple
Tags: Amazon Echo, Siri