Am I the only one thinking this is Google's stealth echo competitor? It has all the right pieces. It's constantly connected to internet and power, zigbee/bluetooth/wifi, speaker, decent (enough) CPU, front end app.
I'm sure they already have an API built into the back end. All they would need to do would be to build a gateway API for developers and add a mic.
Far field speech recognition is _really_ hard. You can't just throw any random set of mic / speaker into a tube and expect it to work. The echo is almost exclusively mic / speaker, in a very specific configuration. There's no way the product they're shipping will be able to do far field speech recognition (much less while playing music).
I too have suspicions the OnHub is a stealth echo competitor. After going through the comments here though, being the hub for home automation/IoT is compelling enough on its own. It'll be very interesting if a tear-down reveals internal microphones.
I'm sure they already have an API built into the back end. All they would need to do would be to build a gateway API for developers and add a mic.