Amazon's best-known side ventures have been consumer electronics devices like the Echo and Fire, but the online retailer is potentially looking into a redo of a product at which it has failed: smartphones. Amazon is developing a smartphone series named Ice, Gadgets360 reports. The series will be powered by Google Android and intended to be a low-cost model for developing markets like India. Internally, the phone's specifications are expected to fit this mold. As Gadgets360 noted, one of the phones potentially will include a 5.2-inch to 5.5-inch display.

Apple brought its smart speaker into the world with a shoddy name and an unconventional pitch, but anyone brash enough to cast the device to the side so easily will surely pay the price. Apple, unlike Amazon and Google, understands that selling glorified intelligence-in-a-box as a method of human computer interaction lacks foresight -- people want a product, not a technology. Launching the HomePod is the most startup-y move Apple has made in years. The company is simultaneously disrupting the massive home speaker market and the emerging smart speakers space. By treating hardware as an opportunity rather than a means to an end, Apple might actually be able to deliver a product that ends up as more than a gimmicky metal tube bound to eventually collect dust on a shelf.

In 2014, Apple's CEO Tim Cook wrote an important letter about how the company makes money. He wrote, "a few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer. If you missed it, that's a dig at Google which makes most of its money selling ads complete with incredibly rich data about its users. At its WWDC keynote this week, the company continued to remind its customers (and Google) that it doesn't need your data to make money. Unlike Google, Facebook and Amazon, Apple makes its money with hardware and to a lesser extent, services like iTunes, App Store and Apple Music.

Apple and Google's new operating systems will roll out to devices later this year, but the companies have already showcased a bit of what users can expect. Apple hosted its WWDC keynote Monday, detailing highlight features on iOS 11, just weeks after Google hosted the keynote for its I/O conference, where it detailed highlight features for Android O. Apple and Google have many similar features within their ecosystems, but not every feature translates directly from iOS to Android. Many updates found in the Photos app in iOS 11 correlates to the Google Photos platform, which is separate from its Android operating system. The equivalent to Apple's iOS native application Siri is Google Assistant, which is also a separate platform from Android. Still, there is much to compare between Apple and Google's upcoming operating systems.

Federighi announced new APIs that help coders building apps for Apple devices do things like recognize faces or animals in photos, or parse the meaning of text. The reasoning goes that if you can make your phones, operating system, or cloud the best place to build smart new software that leverages AI, more users and revenue will follow. For example, Federighi boasted that Apple's new tools help developers run machine learning on data without it having to leave a person's device, giving performance and privacy benefits. A company that needs to run image recognition inside apps on both Apple and Android devices might prefer to use Google's cloud machine learning APIs instead, for example.

Yesterday, Apple announced the "HomePod"--the company's take on the Amazon Echo or Google Home--during WWDC 2017. Since then, there have been countless articles and videos highlighting the new speaker's seven-tweeter array or funky, mesh-wrapped design. But at $349 and with a December ship date, is it really worth it to hold out for the HomePod? It's telling that Apple didn't position the HomePod as a direct Amazon Echo or Google Home competitor and instead set its sights on Sonos and other speaker-first brands. The HomePod is designed first and foremost with audio in mind, and it shows in what's waiting under that mesh hood.

WWDC While touting forthcoming operating system features at its annual developer conference on Monday, Apple made sure to mention machine learning and related AI-oriented terminology over and over. Kevin Lynch, technology veep, talked about Siri, Apple's personal assistant software, becoming more proactive and more aware of watchOS activity through machine learning. Craig Federighi, senior veep of software engineering, highlighted Safari's use of machine learning for intelligent blocking of browser tracking. He also talked about advanced convolutional neural networks improving facial recognition in Photos and making Siri smarter. Federighi cited the utility of Apple's new Metal 2 graphics API for machine learning. And he said deep learning had been used to make Siri's voice sound more natural.

When Apple unveiled the HomePod at WWDC, it was tempting to draw immediate comparisons to the Amazon Echo and Google Home. If anything, Apple is consciously avoiding direct competition with Echo-like speakers -- it's playing up its strong point, audio quality, while downplaying the importance of its AI assistant. The more affordable Echo might be fine for many people so long as the audio quality isn't atrocious. If Amazon or Google gets serious about sound quality in future models, you'd be more justified in making direct comparisons.

Because Apple finally feels Siri is ready. That evolution continued during last year's WWDC, when Apple opened Siri to developers for the first time--but just barely. Developers could integrate Siri to send text messages, make phone calls, power workouts, or make payments, but little else. A new "Siri face" on the Apple Watch will display things Siri thinks you need to know--calendar appointments, reminders, the apps you check most frequently.

Tech companies and start-ups are spending a lot of time these days developing products, refining machine learning and adding personalization capabilities to their smart gadgets. "Almost every product can benefit from AI (Artificial Intelligence), lighting, purification, cleaning--everything that you see in a room needs AI," James Dyson, founder of British tech giant Dyson, said at the launch of their new research facility in Singapore in February. AI is being used everywhere--from headphones, speakers and toothbrushes to robots. Chances are, your next tech purchase could be very intelligent. Kuri, developed by US-based Mayfield Robotics, uses an army of cameras and sensors to roam around your home. It will avoid all obstacles, such as furniture, and its speakers and microphones will allow you to check on parents, children, pets, and home safety in general, from anywhere in the world through your phone.