On Monday, Apple previewed a Siri watch face on Apple Watch to offer reminders and other tasks people might be looking for. On the phone, Apple wants its digital assistant to be more helpful in navigating your digital life. If someone texts you about owing money, for instance, it will ask if you want to pay from your Apple Pay account.

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple on Monday officially unveiled iOS 11 details, the latest update to its long-running mobile operating system. Along with the expected under-the-hood updates and tweaks, the operating system also offers several notable new features. Siri has had a substantial head start on other virtual assistants since its launch in 2011 but hasn't really garnered the attention paid to newer competitors like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. Some of these are more cosmetic: along with an adjusted female voice, you'll be able to change Siri to a male voice. Other features are more technically impressive as Apple demonstrated Siri's live translation feature.

At the annual developers conference, Apple announced the voice recognition software will have a more "natural" tone. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. At the annual developers conference, Apple announced the voice recognition software will have a more "natural" tone.

Apple introduced the HomePod, its rival to Amazon's Echo, at the 2017 WWDC. Apple's new HomPod features seven tweeters, one subwoofer and Siri assitance. The iPhone maker has finally jumped into two of the hottest tech trends of the last two years -- augmented reality and voice-activated speakers, with a promise to dominate these markets pioneered by its rivals. Two years after Amazon introduced its sleeper hit Echo device, and a year after Google Home, Apple now has the voice-activated HomePod, a high-end music speaker priced at $349 that will be powered by Siri. That often maligned but widely used artificial intelligence assistant is also getting an upgrade, though for HomePod, Siri's main task is clear: play music.

Apple is launching a smart home speaker called HomePod to compete with the Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, the company revealed at its annual worldwide developer conference. The Cupertino company described the 7in device, which comes in white and "space grey", as a "breakthrough home speaker" designed to "rock the house". This means that Apple has placed an emphasis on audio quality, packing the speaker with an array of seven tweeters and a woofer as well as "spatial awareness" that detects its location in a room and adapts the output automatically. In announcing the HomePod, Apple CEO Tim Cook said there were many companies making products for enjoying music in the home but "none have nailed it yet". He mentioned wireless speaker systems such as Sonos that "sound good but are not smart" and "other smart speakers" (presumably a reference to Amazon Echo and Google Home) that "don't sound great".

Don't count Apple out even if it's late to the game in unveiling services based on artificial intelligence, one analyst says. CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber says time will tell how well Apple's smarter Siri digital assistant will compete with Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. But he says Apple has an advantage given that it makes software and gadgets designed to work well together. On Monday, Apple previewed a Siri watch face on Apple Watch to offer reminders and other tasks people might be looking for. On the phone, Apple wants its digital assistant to be more helpful in navigating your digital life.

Apple will compete with Google Home and Amazon Echo later this year with a new speaker called HomePod. Apple says its looking to "reinvent" the way we listen to music in the home. Apple said the same chip used in the iPhone will power the speaker. "It's the biggest brains ever in a speaker," said Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller. The HomePod speaker will sell for $349, twice as much as the Amazon Echo.

In one of its most jam-packed events ever, Apple made a slew of announcements during its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. Some involved incremental changes to hardware and software, while others provided a glimpse at where Apple believes the future of computing is headed. As per usual, Apple dedicated a significant portion of its WWDC keynote to the new software features coming to the iPhone and iPad. In iOS 11, iPhone owners will be getting a new Venmo-style option for sending money to friends via Apple Pay, a redesigned control center, a refreshed Apple Music app with more social features, a new Siri with a natural-sounding voice, and an improved Do Not Disturb feature designed to prevent distracted driving, among other additions. Apple also announced camera improvements, including more photo effects like long exposure mode and upgrades for better low-light photography.

Apparently Apple knows Siri kinda sucks, because it was the last thing mentioned in the unveiling of the new HomePod speaker. That's why it's dumpily named as a successor to the iPod, not Apple's old-but-unwise voice assistant. The $349 HomePod Wi-Fi speaker has seven beam-forming tweeters, a custom subwoofer, multi-channel echo cancelling and acoustic modeling in an Apple-y little futuristic shell, trumpeted VP Phil Schiller. Only after gabbing on and on about its sound quality and elegance did he throw up a final slide of the limited range of non-music voice assistance HomePod can provide. Going head-to-head with Google Home's speech recognition or Amazon Echo's voice command developer ecosystem could have been disastrous. It's frustrating yet permissible when Siri stumbles on your phone where you can easily default to your thumbs.

Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC, is generally the stage used to preview the new Mac OS and iOS operating systems, but at WWDC 2017 not only was iOS 11 debuted Apple also unveiled a brand new device not already in the Apple ecosystem; a Siri speaker called HomePod. Apple's HomePod, is a sleek looking smart speaker powered by Siri that in theory should quickly rival Google Home and Amazon Echo. Apple said the HomePod has a December release date. The exact launch day for the HomePod is not set. "Apple reinvented portable music with iPod and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said at WWDC. "HomePod packs powerful speaker technology, Siri intelligence and wireless access to the entire Apple Music library into a beautiful speaker that is less than 7 inches tall, can rock most any room with distortion free music and be a helpful assistant around your home." The HomePod has room-sensing technology that allows the Siri speaker to learn where it is in the room.