More Timers and Calling
Apple took out its chisel on Tuesday to work on the feature differences between the HomePod and the Echo/Home. It added a few extra languages, calling, and… multiple timers? The first two are large, but multiple timers is a small and very minor update. Maybe it’s rule of threes?
With the Ubi, we were able to add timers / alarms fairly quickly. The NLU classifier for it is fairly straightforward and the programming is also simple. Also, the use case for multiple timers and alarms is fairly constrained. Beyond cooking or eldercare, there isn’t much.
With cooking, I can see one saying “remind me in 9 minutes about the pasta” or “remind me in 3 minutes about the mushrooms”. In fact, that’s often been my use case for timers with Alexa.
With 50 Million songs, Apple seems to be doubling down on the music application. Maybe that’s the right approach. Maybe it could come up with some benefit to having more than two HomePods in a room?
