SAN JOSE, Calif.—Today at WWDC, we finally got a look at Apple's rumored smart home speaker, which has home-assistant features buried beneath a music-first sales pitch.

"We want to reinvent home music," Tim Cook told the Monday WWDC keynote crowd before Apple's Phil Schiller revealed and named the new Apple Homepod. The product will cost $349 and launch in certain territories, including the US, this December.















Schiller advertised the company's "breakthrough home speaker" as distortion-free and spatially aware. The 7"-tall device is covered in a "3D mesh fabric" and uses an A8 processor to process and sense various sound-related elements in a given room. Schiller confirmed that multiple Homepods can sync up, should customers be interested in buying the $349 device multiple times over.

Unsurprisingly, Siri is a key element in the Homepod. Schiller announced Siri first and foremost as the Homepod's "musicologist," but he eventually listed off a variety of standard Siri-styled voice requests, such as managing home lights and answering questions about news, weather, and sports scores.

Apple's music-first sales pitch may explain why Apple is pricing this device much higher than comparable home-assistant devices from Google and Amazon, which are not advertised as high-fidelity music devices.

Homepod is the first totally new device Apple has come out with since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015. It will be Apple's challenger to Amazon's Echo with Alexa and Google's Home with Google Assistant.