By Stephen Nellis
NEW YORK, Oct 13 (Reuters) – Apple on Tuesday unveiled a smart-home hub that taps iPhone user data to make Siri more personal, but promised privacy safeguards designed to keep that information out of the company’s hands.
The HomeView smart-home hub, which took center stage at an event in New York, is an important test of Apple’s AI strategy as it tries to close the gap with rivals Amazon and Alphabet’s Google, while reinforcing its reputation for user privacy.
In a series of demonstrations, Apple showed Siri AI recognizing a user’s face and performing personalized tasks such as fetching recipes from text messages, finding a nearby farmer’s market for missing ingredients and then updating shopping lists.
When a different member of the household steps in, the HomeView recognizes that user’s face and switches to their personal data, for example fetching information from text messages about when a friend’s early morning flight lands and how long it will take them to arrive, then teeing up a coffee maker a few minutes ahead of time.
The new device and Siri AI lean on the iPhone to make those personalized features happen, reflecting new CEO John Ternus’ vision of Apple’s best-selling product as an “intelligent personal hub” laid out at Apple’s iPhone launch event last month.
Siri AI’s usefulness hinges on how much it knows about a user. HomeView draws on a personal search index stored on the user’s iPhone to personalize responses.
“That will give you what’s more relevant, what’s more timely, what’s important to you, because it’s coming from your iPhone,” Kaiann Drance, Apple’s vice president of product marketing for home products, said in an interview.
PRIVACY SAFEGUARDS AND ENCRYPTION
HomeView has its own operating system and runs on Apple’s A18 chip, designed to process encrypted user data in a walled-off part of the chip. To access private data, a user’s iPhone has to be connected to the same home network as HomeView, and no private data is stored on the HomeView device itself. Apple said none of the data is used for marketing, including first-party advertising efforts.
“One of the things we talked about is not building a marketing profile,” Drance said. “Our intent is to provide users a helpful experience that adheres to simplicity, being personal, being intelligent, and continuing our commitment to privacy.”
A key difference between Siri AI and rival systems is that it does not end each interaction with a follow-up question designed to elicit more information from the user, a practice that Lilian Rincon, vice president of product marketing for AI, said was a deliberate choice on Apple’s part.
“For us, it’s really about creating these really great products for consumers, which is why we’re not in this game of getting you to engage and continue the conversation in many, many, many turns,” Rincon said.
HomeView also required Apple to figure out how to make Siri personal on a device shared by multiple people in communal spaces such as a kitchen. Apple demonstrated HomeView juggling requests from family members during the morning rush to school and work.
While the device can recognize up to six voices and faces to show private data, Apple said it will make decisions on which user to prioritize based on who last touched the device and other factors, and that some features such as weather and thermostat controls will be available to any user.
“There is a logic built in to kind of manage that experience,” Drance said. “There was thought put into the nature of that communal computer sharing of the voice and the face recognition.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in New York; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Matthew Lewis)
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