HomePod shipments in the United States increased 180% year-on-year in the last quarter, eclipsing the growth of smart speaker makers Amazon and Google during the period, market intelligence firm Omdia reports.

While Apple still lags behind the other two companies on shipments, it is looking more competitive than it has at any point in the history of the HomePod so far. That’s particularly impressive when considering that this was a rough three-month period for smart speakers in the US, whose growth is stalling.

The Sonos Roam is a new high-end smart speaker with support for Apple AirPlay 2, so it plays nicely with iPhone or other Apple computers.

The tubular accessory weights in just under a pound, but Sonos says, “precision-engineered acoustics deliver the clarity, depth, and fullness you would expect from a much larger speaker.”

“Hey Siri” can be inadvertently activated by other wake words including “A city,” “Hey Jerry,” and more, reveal researchers from Germany’s Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Bochum Max Planck Institute.

Siri’s far from the only voice assistant with a weakness when it comes to false triggers, however. The study compiled a list of over 1,000 words that can accidentally activate different A.I. assistants.

Sonic loaded its newest soundbar with high-end features, including Dolby Atmos. But the Sonos Arc is intended for more than home theater. It includes Apple AirPlay 2 so it can handle music, podcasts and radio when the TV is off.

Apple sold just 2.6 million HomePods into the retail channel worldwide in the last three months of 2020, a new report claims. While that is up from the 1.6 million units it shipped the same quarter a year earlier, it’s still a fraction of the total shipped by market leader Amazon.

“The price is still very high,” David Watkins, director at Strategy Analytics, told Cult of Mac. “That closes the door to a huge swathe of potential customers.”

One of the most useful travel features from Google Assistant is ready for the iPhone.

After bringing its real-time translation feature to Assistant-enabled smart displays and speakers earlier this year, Google is finally adding to the feature to the Google Assistant app on Android and iOS today.

If you’re on the hunt for a good portable speaker, look no further than this pair from Vizio. Each is a solid, sleek wireless speaker with great features and eye-catching design. Even better, they’re both discounted by more than half, so you can get them for a song.

Apple didn’t mention HomePod during yesterday’s iPhone 11 event — but it certainly didn’t forget about it, either.

Following the keynote, Apple quietly updated HomePod’s webpage. In doing so, it added exciting details about improvements being lined up for Apple’s smart speaker this fall.

18 months after it first went on sale in the U.S., Apple’s HomePod speaker is finally launching in Japan.

Having teased that it would launch sometime this summer, Apple has now revealed that HomePod will be available to buy August 23. The Siri-powered device opened for pre-orders this week.

A drop in the price of the HomePod hasn’t helped Apple grow its share of the smart speaker market. It still has just a tiny percentage of all the units in use in the US, according to new figures from a market-research firm.