Jony Ive’s first OpenAI gadget is reportedly a hockey puck-sized smart speaker

Word is trickling out about what Sam Altman and Jony Ive have actually been cooking up together, and it's less sci-fi than some expected. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports the first hardware product from their partnership is essentially a smart speaker minus the screen — doughnut-shaped, battery-powered, and small enough to fit in your palm, roughly the size of a hockey puck.

What sets it apart from the Echo dots and HomePods already cluttering countertops isn't raw specs so much as personality. Gurman's sources describe physical components that move on their own, signaling when the device is listening or responding, paired with lights, a built-in camera system, and an array of sensors. The pitch seems to be an object that feels alive rather than a static box waiting for a wake word.

Portability is apparently a design pillar too. The battery-powered build is meant to travel easily around a house, which suggests OpenAI isn't just chasing the kitchen-counter market that Amazon and Google have fought over for a decade. Instead, this sounds like an attempt to make an AI companion that follows you from room to room, always within reach.

None of this arrives soon, though. Gurman's timeline points to a 2027 launch, and the price tag is expected to clear $300 — hardly an impulse buy. That's a long runway for a device built around AI models that are evolving practically every quarter, so whatever ships in two years may look quite different from what's being described now. Ive left Apple's design shop years ago to build LoveFrom, and this OpenAI collaboration marks his most ambitious hardware swing since then, with plenty riding on whether a puck with personality can actually change how people interact with AI at home.