Gadget Lab Podcast: A Deep Dive on Apple's HomePod

The way you control Apple's smart speaker, the HomePod, is pretty cool. You just talk to it. But Siri, Apple's voice assistant, can't make the speaker do much beyond the basics and can only summon music from Apple-owned cloud services. That sets it behind the other products in the voice-activated speaker race--most notably those from Amazon or Google--which are capable, flexible, and largely platform-neutral when it comes to streaming. It's too bad Siri can't play internet radio or the deep cuts from your local MP3 library, because the speaker itself sounds absolutely amazing.