Apple to release Siri speaker that hooks up to iPhones and talks to people at WWDC

Apple is making a Siri speaker that will sit in people's houses and speak to them.

The company's Siri speaker has gone into production and will work as a way of listening to music as well as getting information by talking to it, according to reports. That will put it in competition with companies like Google and Amazon, both fo which make their own speaking speakers.

Apple has already brought its Siri technology to pretty much everything it makes: phones, Macs, and TVs. But it is planning to make a specific product that includes it for the first ever time.

That Siri speaker has long been in the works but is now being made, according to Bloomberg. It's likely that it will be unveiled at its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, the report claimed, but it certainly won't be available until later in the year.

It will look to stand out from those other tech giants' competitors – the Home and the Echo – by including much better speakers that include virtual surround sound technology and also adding better support for Apple's product lineup, according to the report. Apple has made speakers before – like the iPod HiFi – as well as owning Beats headphones and using its own way of sending music wirelessly across networks.

It might provide extra music features including a feature that could measure a room's acoustics and adjust the sound according to them – something that's currently offered in the Sonos speakers that are sold in the Apple Store. The company also intends for its speakers to sound better than those in Google and Amazon's products.

Creating such a speaker would help encourage people to join and stay in the Apple ecosystem, according to the same report. The Home and Echo can't play music from Apple Music, for instance – whereas an Apple speaker could play music only from there, and add extra features that require an iPhone or other product to use.

As well as playing music and answering questions, the speaker will be a useful way of automating people's homes, allowing them to talk to their lights or ovens and turn them off and on, for instance.

The Siri speaker was reported to have reached an advanced prototype stage last year. But now Apple executives have been secretly testing it out and have started the process of getting the product ready.

The company has been working hard to improve Siri in recent years, as other companies launch competing voice assistants. It has added new ways of letting the software speak to third-party services, for instance, and is expected to add more of those soon.

Apple is planning to introduce new hardware at the WWDC event for the first time since 2013. As well as possibly bringing out the speaker, it's also expected to show off new Macs and iPads – alongside the usual updates to its iOS and Mac sotware.