Apple released its next big thing and nobody noticed

It seems pretty clear that 2017 is going to be the year that Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant really begins to hit its stride, going from a fast-growing niche product to a mainstream must-have. While Microsoft and especially Google have made their competitive strategies clear -- even Samsung and Baidu have started to make rumbles in the market -- there's one elephant that, notably, isn't in the room yet: Apple, the most valuable company in the world and a notorious latecomer to any new product category. While Apple recently built Siri into the Apple TV, the company is said to be working on a direct competitor to the Amazon Echo -- one that would apparently be more advanced than anything we've seen, down to a possible facial-recognition camera so it knows who's talking. That device, if and when it comes out, would bring Apple's 5-year-old Siri assistant head-to-head with Alexa. And the clock is ticking.