HomePod‬, ‪Apple Inc.‬, ‪Smart speaker‬, ‪Amazon Echo‬, ‪Amazon Alexa‬‬, II How to Make Your Home Smart with Voice Control and Mesh Wi-Fi , II , Is Apple Going to Have a Tough Time Playing on Alexa's Turf?

HomePod‬, ‪Apple Inc.‬, ‪Smart speaker‬, ‪Amazon Echo‬, ‪Amazon Alexa‬‬, Mesh Wi-Fi Networks, Voice Control , Apple's HomePod , Amazon's Alexa strategy

HomePod‬, ‪Apple Inc.‬, ‪Smart speaker‬, ‪Amazon Echo‬, ‪Amazon Alexa‬‬, II How to Make Your Home Smart with Voice Control and Mesh Wi-Fi , II , Is Apple Going to Have a Tough Time Playing on Alexa's Turf?

In 2017, the Smart Home picked up a huge amount of popularity, with pretty much every organization out there putting out a shrewd home item. Regardless of whether that was a smart plug, a smart light, or even a camera, pretty much everybody has an item in the space now. Be that as it may, for 2018, two of the enormous patterns will be voice control, and internet routers, particularly, Mesh WiFi Routers. Voice control is also going to be a huge thing in 2018, especially with Apple’s Homepod on the market

Voice Control

Google Assistant is the one compatible with smart homes products. Amazon Alexa, too. They both allow you to set the assistant to do things., and it won’t ask any questions. To be exact, you can set it to turn on the light and make your coffee for you.

At this moment, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are ruling the voice control space for Smart Home. Try not to anticipate that that will be the situation in 2018. While Apple’s Siri and Homekit are as of now accessible, and you do really have voice control from your iPhone, iPad or Mac, with the arrival of the Homepod, it ought to end up plainly more standard.

Since Microsoft has Cortana on most PCs nowadays, and it is accessible on the two iOS and Android, it won’t be long until it gets up to speed with the opposition.

If you have different lights for different companies, it might get a little bit confused and it will take some time to understand which light to turn on or off. But they’ll get it through time.

Mesh Wi-Fi Networks

To upgrade your router is something many people avoid doing unless they totally need to do it. Be that as it may, with smart home items assuming control over nowadays, it’s essential to upgrade your router and move to another WiFi alternative. A Mesh WiFi system has turned out to be truly well known in the previous year, and that is for the most part because of the brilliant home industry picking up force.

Mesh WiFi is able to have lots of products connected at the same time,  and giving them simply enough WiFi to make them work without any trouble using your PC. With Mesh Wi-Fi you’ll also have internet even outside, over 4,500 square feet, so we think it’s a great deal.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) had its biggest holiday season ever this year and its best-selling products were the Echo Dot voice-controlled speaker and the Fire TV Stick  that sold for $29.99 and $39.99, respectively.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) delayed the launch of its $349 HomePod voice-controlled speaker until sometime in January. Even if it had been available, chances are the HomePod would have been far behind the Echo Dot in sales due mainly to device pricing.

And Amazon is not letting up on the pressure. The e-commerce leviathan continues to sell the Echo Dot for $29.99, a discount of 40% from the list price of $49.99, even as the 2017 holiday season recedes further in the rear-view mirror.

Smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot, Apple’s HomePod, and Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Home have reached a “critical adoption threshold” according to comScore. Analysts at eMarketer project the number of U.S. smart speaker users to reach 35.6 million in 2017 (13% of internet users) and 52.8 million in 2019 (18.8% of internet users).

A few days before Christmas, eMarketer analyst Cindy Liu compared consumer interest in smart speakers to their interest in wearables like Apple Watch:

Consumers have yet to find a reason to justify the cost of a smartwatch, which can sometimes cost as much as a smartphone. Instead, for this holiday season, we expect smart speakers to be the gift of choice for many tech enthusiasts, because of their lower price points.

Given Amazon’s consistent strategy of striving for share over profit, it’s easy to see why the company is keeping the price of its Echo Dot low. Smart speakers are positioned as gateway devices for smart homes where a variety of smart appliances and other smart devices like thermostats and lights can be voice-controlled through the smart speaker.

Amazon is the unquestioned leader in voice-controlled devices and plans to build on that leadership position to keep Apple an also-ran. Google Home, which sells for $79 at Walmart with a promotional discount of $25 if a customer buys one with Google Express, can put even more pressure on Apple.

Apple's HomePod might be in trouble. We're not talking about its design, or even its delays—annoying and expected as they might be for a typical Apple entry into a new product category. There's the simple fact that Amazon, at this moment, is a smart-home juggernaut, and that's going to make Apple's first steps into the smart speaker space that much trickier.

At least, that's the argument being put forth by M.G. Siegler, general partner at GV, who wrote a Medium post Thursday highlighting a telling statistic from a recent article from The Economist: Amazon has sold 75 percent of the world's smart speakers and is now the largest speaker brand worldwide. Additionally, Amazon's Echo Dot was its top-selling device for holiday shopping and the Fire TV stick, with its Alexa smart assistant built-in, took second place. That's a lot of Alexa in a lot of hands, and that's a huge milestone for Amazon, Siegler says.

"I've been thinking about this recently not just in the context of putting Echoes in hotels, but also relative to Apple. As we're all well aware, Apple had to delay their foray into the space, the HomePod, into 2018. But not only did they miss the all-important holiday shopping season, I'm increasingly thinking that they may have missed the boat," he writes.

"Believe me, I know how dangerous this line of thinking is with regard to Apple. Apple is almost never the first-mover in a market. Instead, they prefer to sit back and let markets mature enough to then swoop in with their effort, which more often than not is the best effort (this is both subjective in terms of my own taste, and often objective in terms of sales). But again, I increasingly don't believe that this will be the case with their smart speaker."

According to Siegler, Amazon's advantage comes from its attempts to get Alexa in as many hands as it possibly can. When it's selling an Echo Dot for $29, that's low enough to make shoppers much more interested in giving the smart device a try—not so much for a smart speaker that costs hundreds of dollars.

"As 2017 comes to a close, I still wouldn't want a one-room-only AI assistant. But now that Echo speakers start at only $50 — $30 on sale — I can easily accept having separate or linked AI assistants anchored all throughout my home," writes VentureBeat's Jeremy Horwitz, a huge Siri fan who has since accepted Alexa into his tech lifestyle.

"Amazon anticipated this last year by offering Echo Dots in discounted 6- and 12-packs; it more recently offered discounts on 3-Dot and 6-Dot bundles. The latter deal offered six (or seven) rooms of Alexa coverage for less than a single Apple HomePod, which still doesn't have a launch date."

Though Apple is notorious for waiting for the right moment to jump into a product category, attacking with innovations and high profit margins, the story might turn out a little differently for the HomePod.

"All I know is that I love Amazon's Alexa strategy right now. And I think Apple is in for a rude awakening with the HomePod if they wish to ever compete in this space — which they obviously do. Apple doesn't mind being late to the game. In fact, they prefer it. But it feels like the game has changed ahead of their entry, for once," Siegler writes.

HomePod‬, ‪Apple Inc.‬, ‪Smart speaker‬, ‪Amazon Echo‬, ‪Amazon Alexa‬‬, Mesh Wi-Fi Networks, Voice Control , Apple's HomePod , Amazon's Alexa strategy

HomePod‬, ‪Apple Inc.‬, ‪Smart speaker‬, ‪Amazon Echo‬, ‪Amazon Alexa‬‬, II How to Make Your Home Smart with Voice Control and Mesh Wi-Fi , II , Is Apple Going to Have a Tough Time Playing on Alexa's Turf?