I think that Apple has bet (correctly) that voice is a feature not a platform and that great hardware will make people buy into its services. Voice is great for a few things but very lousy for most things. Obviously it's all conjecture at this point, but my guess is that this product will augment the use of its devices for the things that voice is superior to GUI for (playing music and basic queries). Since Apple typically blows the competition out of the water with design and marketing, I imagine that this will do pretty well in this space (just imagine walking into an Apple store and seeing an IKEA-like display with a sleek home theatre and its speaker system on display).
I do think that the walled-garden is concerning since you can't use it with all music services, for example, but on the other hand, if its a premium speaker system that might be enough to push me the other way and switch to Apple music. The question is is the product compelling enough to get people to buy into the platform.
I agree that voice is lousy for many things, maybe even most things. And I think Apple is uniquely positioned to offer an end-to-end experience across devices (desktop, laptop, phone, watch, house/speaker) and that their design sensibilities could lead to a top notch speaker. I think the product will find buyers. But it's ultimate utility will remain in question until Siri improves.
I think part of the problem is that the things 'voice' is good for tend to have humans on the receiving end that then carry out complex, human actions. "Stu, could you schedule a dinner for me at a good local Italian place at 7:30 and invite Scott and Robin?"
Well shoot, that is a lot to unpack! It's a hell of a lot for a computer to unpack. It's a lot for anyone to unpack unless they know you and your circle of contacts. Carrying it out would require interaction with at least 3 people over a variety of mediums.
I suspect that by opening Siri up (And other digital 'assitants') it might promote the growth of infrastructure and services that would begin to make some of these more advanced queries a little more tractable.
I think that's very much the problem. Current voice systems are really just API-command-by-voice, maybe with a tiny amount of context awareness.
To be really compelling, voice needs to offer the whole AI concierge experience. At a basic level, it needs to be able to deal with queries like "Find me a good place to stay in Barcelona" and "Find me a new jacket". It needs to ask questions as needed, to operate with the initiative to search tens or hundreds of sites, and to recognise the useful data in the results.
With Google, Amazon, and the rest, search is becoming more and more of a problem, not less. For non-trivial searches, finding good products and/or reliable information can be incredibly time-consuming.
So currently voice is a bandaid on top of search tools that aren't progressing much, and may even be regressing. Voice has to solve the search problem first before the recognition and context awareness problems really become important.
It looks as if the industry is to trying to do this the other way around. I'm not convinced that's going to work. It works up to a point, but the point isn't as advanced as users expect it to be, and the overall experience can be disappointing.
Apple's prowess is in designing physically attractive objects, and easy to use UI. Voice has very little UI, and it has even less use for physical appearance. That's not to say that how these things look isn't important. It is. But it's nowhere near as important as it was with a phone.
My argument is that voice isn't all that useful in general and that if Apple creates a much higher quality product than Echo, for example, that people will want it because it's a very nice speaker that looks really cool and can play music, give the weather, and set a timer by voice, which covers the majority of use cases.
In other words, a voice platform that works 10x better than another may only be slightly more useful to the average consumer while if the actual speaker is 10x better, it might be 10x more compelling.
I do think that the walled-garden is concerning since you can't use it with all music services, for example, but on the other hand, if its a premium speaker system that might be enough to push me the other way and switch to Apple music. The question is is the product compelling enough to get people to buy into the platform.