According to an anonymously sourced report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, the much hyped and frequently mocked physical doohickey coming soon from OpenAI will be… a smart speaker that moves. In April, another major source of Apple rumors, Ming-Chi Kuo, analyst at TF International Securities described something in a different category when he said OpenAI was releasing an “AI agent phone.” One (or both) of these rumors could be wrong, or this could be a different device, or—and in my view this is equally likely—the thing OpenAI is making could split the difference between being a phone and being a smart speaker.
After all, what’s in the Bloomberg article doesn’t sound entirely stale and uncreative. It will apparently be portable, battery-powered, and small enough to be easy to move from one room to another—like a baby monitor or 90s cordless phone perhaps. But it will also be capable of controlling the smart appliances in your house, screenless, and chatbot-powered, like a smart speaker. And then there’s this curveball: it will reportedly have mechanical components that allow it to move in some way or another, giving the impression that it is “alive.” If that part about moving sounds harebrained to you, what if I said it sounds oddly like something Apple has been working on for the past few years? There are reportedly three prototype home devices that have been floating around Cupertino for a while: two Siri-powered smart speakers, meant to introduce a new and more sophisticated Apple HomePod ecosystem, along with a third that is also a little robot that moves around your tabletop.
