Where’s Apple’s Amazon Echo competitor?

Amazon is iterating quickly with the Amazon Echo as the company just announced the Amazon Echo Look, which is essentially an Echo with a camera. What is Apple’s answer? All we have is yet another rumor that Apple is working on a sort of connected speaker with a brain.

This time, Sonny Dickson is back with a couple of tweets. He usually shares iPhone leaks, so this isn’t necessarily in his comfort zone, but here’s what he has to say:

It is believed to carry some form of Beats technology, and is expected to run an variant iOS

— Sonny Dickson (@SonnyDickson) April 27, 2017

If that sounds familiar, it’s because this rumor has been going on for a while. Bloomberg wrote that a team was working on this mysterious device back in September already.

Apple isn’t starting from scratch. The company has been working on Siri for years. Users generally don’t like Siri as much as other vocal assistants, such as Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. But Apple has a clear competitive advantage — Siri works in dozens of different languages.

The Amazon Echo is only available in a handful of countries (most of them English-speaking countries), and Google Assistant is still restricted to English. So Apple theoretically doesn’t have much competition in a big part of the world, including China.

But that’s not all. Do you remember the iPod Hi-Fi? The short-lived device was probably too expensive. But it’s good to remember that Apple was selling a stand-alone speaker less than ten years ago.

While the Amazon Echo doesn’t sound as good as Sonos speakers, Apple could position its rumored Echo competitor as a high-end speaker that also happens to be a vocal assistant.

In addition to that, the company could be selling a ton of Apple Music subscriptions if it was the only way to stream music on the device. Even more important than Siri, Apple’s Amazon Echo could be a dedicated Apple Music device.