Siri on Third-Party Devices
Over the past few years, Apple has shown a remarkable willingness to embrace and extend third-party devices outside its own walled garden. It started with Apple Music on Android, which later extended to even Amazon Alexa speakers, and now it’s taking another big leap by offering Siri to third-party device manufacturers. It also looks like this will go beyond simply smart speakers, as Apple demoed the feature by showing an ecobee thermostat receiving a Siri command. Since the ecobee4 is already Alexa-enabled, it’s probably not a stretch to imagine the company adding Siri support to it as well. Obviously, it will still be up to individual manufacturers to add Siri support, but Apple seems to be making this as easy as possible for them to do, and Cason says we should start seeing the first devices appear later this year.