This is what Apple’s event invitation means (maybe)

Is it only me who sees the Siri animation running on a HomePod in the background of the latest Apple event invitation? 

The colors seem right, there’s a definite circle in the background, and while the new hardware is important, the introduction of SiriAI is strategically imperative – perhaps it needs to be on the invite?

Let’s take a look – 

Here are two images:

An image Apple PR distributed with the first HomePod:

The invitation image:

Opinions are a dime a dozen

While it’s not clear, you can certainly identify the echo of a circle in the image, and for all the discussion about hinges, creases, and folding iPhones, it’s the Siri animation on HomePod picture Apple has previously used I can’t help but see. Just with a new color wash.

If I’m right – and opinions on the invitation are a dime a dozen this morning, and I could be wrong – but if I am right, then the invite suggests we’ll learn of a few additional surprising Siri features, and these may well relate to pushing Apple’s HomePod and future smart home product to the center of our digital lives. 

What could it be?

Will Siri suddenly become your reassuring morning wake-up companion, helping you rise and shine? Digging out really accurate contextual info to help you all the way through your day, your rise and shine becomes surprise and shine?

Think about it just a little bit and it could even seem obvious.

After all, have we not spent the last two years talking about Siri, Apple, and artificial intelligence? Is it only me who feels that once Apple responded to critics with an improved Siri at WWDC we all ran off to start talking about hardware again, because Siri was so much better now?

The only problem is that “now” hasn’t happened yet.

People are still so yesterday

The vast majority of the global population is not running beta versions of the software, and even those betas that do exist may not be release feature complete quite yet.

Apple controls the release cadence which means there is still opportunity to add new features that haven’t yet been announced. 

We also know that whatever it is that Apple does have planned for its intelligent assistant, AI is critical to its future product plans. We’ve been told before that Apple had wanted to get its smarthome products out the door earlier but was unable to do so because Siri wasn’t up to it.

People left the company and teams got shifted around as a result.

There were casualties for that failure.

Which means Siri is pretty important. 

Wake up, sheeples

That means that whatever hardware Apple does introduce in a week or two will lean pretty heavily on its AI companion, so where better than that to focus the element of surprise?

Is Apple going to surprise us with something for the smarthome? An AI-based home companion that promises all the AI tools we need at home, but with added rock solid privacy as its USP?

There’s only thirteen sleeps until we find out. 

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