Apple is taking a big swing at the smart home market. The company on Tuesday unveiled its long-rumored smart home hub, dubbed HomeView, that can act as a central control point for smart home devices, be used for FaceTime calls, playing music, watching videos, displaying photo slideshows, and more. 

The new $299 device looks like a cuboid version of the HomePod, but with a display added to the front. The HomeView comes in two versions: one can sit on a countertop and the other can be mounted on a wall. Measuring 7 inches wide, the hub features a single FaceTime camera on the front, and has microphones and speakers built into its base. There is no camera on the back.

Apple has preloaded the device with several of its apps, including Calendar, Messages, Photos, FaceTime, Notes, Reminders, Music, and Podcasts. That means users won’t need to reach for their iPhone if they want to check a calendar appointment, send a message, play some music, or look at photos.

Apple sees the device being particularly useful in places such as the kitchen. Someone cooking dinner, for example, could pull up a recipe, watch a video, check a calendar, or start a FaceTime call without resorting to their phone.

One of the more interesting aspects of the device is how it works with different members of a household.

The hub runs Apple’s updated Siri AI assistant, and can recognize individual people in the house. Once it identifies someone, the screen can show information meant for that person, such as their messages, contacts, calendar appointments, notes, and preferred apps. The experience changes automatically when another family member walks up to the device.

HomeView puts Apple in a much more direct fight with Amazon and Google, both of which already have established smart display products: Amazon has its Echo Show line, while Google offers the Nest Hub.

Apple has had a mixed history in the smart home space, however, with products such as the HomePod struggling to reach the same level of popularity as competing devices. The new hub is an opportunity for Apple to change that by combining home controls with the company’s wider ecosystem.

The device has been rumored for quite some time, with reports pointing to delays caused in part by problems with Siri AI. Those issues have reportedly affected Apple’s broader smart home plans as well.

This may only be the first step in Apple’s plans for the smart home space. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has previously reported that Apple could eventually take the concept further with a more advanced version that features a robotic arm. Such a device could move its display and interact in a more physical way.

Pre-orders start today, and the device will be available to buy from November 13. It comes in four colors: silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray.

Apple launched a new $299 Apple TV 4K streaming device today, with an upgraded chip, integration with the updated version of Siri AI for content discovery, and mics that allow users to issue voice commands directly without using the remote.

The refreshed Apple TV 4K comes with an upgraded A19 chip to enable various AI features. Hardware-wise, the new streaming box comes with three far-field microphones, letting users talk with Siri without a remote or a paired HomePod.

The company said that users can now have a four-speaker surround sound experience with Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini 2 or HomePod 2 speakers.

The remote also gets a welcome update: it now includes a small speaker. This helps users find the remote easily when it gets lost in the nooks and corners of the couch or when they leave the remote in another room while doing a chore. (Apple added a way to find the remote with Siri and Find My in 2023, but it hinged on showing directions in the app rather than an audible sound.)

With Siri AI now rolling out to all Apple platforms, the big draw for Apple is to utilize it for better personalization and content recommendations. On the Apple TV, viewers can ask questions like “What Apple TV shows won at the Emmy Awards this year?” to search for content or ask for more information about shows with questions like “Where was Pluribus filmed?”

Rivals Google and Amazon have also added AI for content suggestions in the past few years

The device is not updated as often as other Apple hardware, given this long-pending upgrade comes four years after the launch of Apple TV 4K in 2022. Bloomberg reported that the company wanted to launch the new device in 2024, but delays in launching the AI-powered Siri forced Apple to push the launch of new home devices as well.

Consumers can pre-order the new Apple TV 4K starting today, and the device will be available on November 13.

Personal AI agents are increasingly making transactions on their users’ behalf, but given the nondeterministic nature of large language models, AI bots are prone to doing what they’re not supposed to. Which, in this case, raises the possibility of AI misfiring and making unauthorized transactions.

To get ahead of this problem, American Express is introducing a new framework designed to capture and authenticate a customer’s purchase intent before an AI agent completes the transaction.

The idea is that there should be a way to ensure that the customer’s purchase instructions are carried throughout the transaction lifecycle, Amex says, from the purchase to everything that follows.

Dubbed the “Intent Intelligence Framework,” the company hopes it will become an industry standard for AI-powered transactions.

“These new transactions will have a consumer, a merchant, and an agent,” explained Amex’s VP of Agentic Partnerships and Strategy, Hannah Bozian, in an interview with TechCrunch. She said the company wanted to ensure that agentic transactions are still “seamless, trusted, and secure, the way our card members expect them to be.”

This framework’s release follows the company’s April launch of Amex’s Agentic Commerce Experiences, or the ACE Developer Toolkit, which includes a handful of services that now include the intent framework.

Amex said it has not yet seen an increase in disputes because of agentic commerce, but it wanted to be proactive in building this technology as this type of commerce scales. In part, that’s because consumers have signaled they’re open to trying agentic commerce.

In a recent Amex Trendex report, 66% of surveyed U.S. consumers said they’re likely to use AI agents to research the best price for a product or service, and 61% said they’re likely to use it for a product or service recommendation over the next 12 months, the company told TechCrunch.

To start, Amex’s new intent framework begins with a Create Intent API, which will capture the customer’s purchase instructions along with other constraints they may have included in their request, like the merchant’s name, maximum budget, and other product preferences. How this intent is collected may vary depending on the AI model involved, but the plan is to make this framework flexible enough to support all agentic commerce models, Bozian said.

The customer then authenticates their identity and signs off on the intent captured by the agent.

Then an Intent ID, a unique identifier representing the intent, is created, along with a Proof of Intent Token, which includes the customer’s high-level constraints. This token is used to obtain a secure digital payment credential that the agent will use at checkout instead of the customer’s actual credit card number. In doing so, Amex says, the purchase will remain secure while being aligned with what the customer authorized the agent to do.

This Intent ID and token can also be used in different parts of the transaction process, helping companies to manage areas like fraud prevention and dispute resolution, Amex said.

“Our approach differs from the implementations of others in that it pulls intent earlier into the transaction flow. And this is important because it helps mitigate some risk before the risk occurs,” said Bozian. She offered the example of a customer asking an agent to buy white Nike sneakers in a size 9, but the agent submits a request to purchase shoes from Adidas. In such a case, Amex could prevent the transaction from going through because the agent made a mistake.

Bozian also notes that while many agents today ask for customer consent before making a purchase, Amex foresees a future where agents may act much more autonomously in some cases. For instance, a consumer might allow their agent to re-order household staples, like paper towels or toilet paper — categories in which the only real constraint is the price and size, not merchant or brand. In these scenarios, it makes sense to have technology in the loop performing that extra check, to ensure the transactions match the customer’s intent.

Having a log of what was authorized by which agent and when could also help address fraud on behalf of the agent, she noted.

Amex is already in discussions with partners across the payments ecosystem for implementing ACE, which includes the agentic tokens that contain Amex’s payment credentials, as well as other parts of the developer kit.

The company said it plans to actively develop ACE further as the agentic commerce ecosystem evolves.

On October 13 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026‘s Industry Stage, Amex VP of Agentic Partnerships and Strategy at American Express, Hannah Bozian, will discuss the company’s new”Intent Intelligence Framework” in more detail, and what it means for the world of agentic commerce.