> And the design should help it stand out from current smart speakers, a category dominated by Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

I'm not sure how good OpenAI's device will have to be to be a success. The iPhone became a hit because it did what everyones phone did (calls and text) but had other cool features that other phones didn't and people upgraded phones every few years. I'm assuming that Amazon, Google, and Apple etc have teams working on better voice control and features that they'll roll out to existing speakers when or before OpenAI release a device.

Google is killing the Assistant on phones and replacing it with Gemini. Oh joy, a simple speech to text plus command parsing gets replaced aith something that needs planet-burning processing power. And is slower.

At least Assistant still works on my "smart" clock, although it's getting slower that I wonder if they've replaced it with Gemini underneath.

The iPhone (or any smart phone) is multi-modal.

A smart speaker sounds like an AI system with disabilities.