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| © Photo by James Bareham / The Verge |
By Shannon Liao, The Verge
Apple had an idea for a future HomePod that would offer an emoji
version of Siri and LED lights that could display a variety of useful
information, starting with the weather. In a 2017 patent application
that was made publicly available in late January, Apple threw a bunch
of increasingly far-out ideas onto its request to the US Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO), as spotted by Mac Rumors.
The
patent doesn’t name the HomePod specifically, but it does describe it
pretty accurately as a device housed by fabric walls containing a mic
and a speaker, so it’s hard to think Apple is talking about something
else. That said, Apple is thinking of interweaving LEDs within the
fabric to display everything from the weather to the time to sports
results. The patent also describes the same tech displaying incoming
email subject lines and even an emoji-based representation of Siri.
Siri as a mood ring
The
LEDs could supposedly respond and change when you wave your hand in
front of it, using 3D gesture support. Emoji Siri could display
different moods and expressions depending on the context it was in,
Apple proposes. For instance, it could pick up, by listening to your
voice, whether you sounded sad. From there, Siri could either
commiserate and also look sad, or, and Apple hasn’t quite decided on
this yet, it might look happy so as to help you cheer up. Presumably,
this could come with appropriate music choice suggestions.
Apple
even proposes a way for Siri to analyze the tone of your emails and read
them back to you while showing a sad, happy, or angry face. The mood
would depend on the overall vibe your incoming email gave off. Apple
also proposes the email sender could pick out which emotion it wanted
Siri to adopt.
HomePod might also some day gain Face ID to figure
out who was standing near it and how far away they might be, letting it
customize user profiles and music requests. Further down the line, it
might be able to better pick out if its owner was nearby and then grant
access to personal messages, notes, and reminders. Or it could see that a
guest of the home was near and remove that access for now.
Of
course, all those wild, futuristic ideas still rest inside a patent
application for now. So it’s too early to tell when, if ever, they’ll
materialize into an actual product.
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