Rumors have emerged that Apple is planning to jump on the smart-speaker bandwagon at its WWDC event going to be held next month. This means the Amazon Echo and Google Home will face some strong competition.
According to a report by CNET, rumors are probably strife that the Apple smart speaker will cost around $199, with shipping commencing in the second half of the year or atleast this is what the industry analysts feel.
However, if you are not in a mood to wait while the Apple event comes, or pay that amount when it finally launches, you can easily create your own “Siri” speaker” setup.
What do you need?
Anyone with an iPhone and familiar with Siri will know about the whole “Hey Siri” function within the iPhone. Because the feature can be invoked hands-free (by saying, “Hey Siri”), all you need now is a Bluetooth speaker to round the equation.
Before we talk more on the setup, a little information of the operation first. Any modern iDevice can be setup for this project, as long as it has a reasonably current version of iOS. Although iPhone models older than the 6S must be plugged in for “Hey Siri” to work when the screen is off, you can leave the old iPhone plugged in anyway — so that is not an issue.
As for the speaker, anything you can connect you phone is fair enough. We would recommend a simple Bluetooth speaker, though. Although it needs to stay powered on when plugged in — some speakers have an auto-off feature, which you wouldn’t here.
You can also take the wired path, plug one end of the 3.5mm aux cable into your phone and the other into a speaker or even an old stereo. Which means, now you have to keep your speaker and your iPhone plugged in full-time.
This setup will not provide the same aesthetic as the Apple product which will deliver when it will be launch, but functionality it should get you close.
Lastly, you just need to be sure your “Hey Siri” option is enabled, which can be done by tapping Settings>Siri and making sure all options are active. This way, Siri will respond to you even when the screen is off.
You might think what about your current iPhone? Won’t it be listening as well? Sure enough, spoken commands may trigger both phones at the same time, and for now, there is no real workaround for this, other than to disable the option on your primary phone. Or you can just keep it out of earshot of your Siri speaker.
