Drop has integrated its voice activation software with Apple's Siri and appliance manufacturer Bosch so that Bosch coffee machines with Home Connect will now allow users to call out a coffee order without having to touch a button.

The service will go live from March 11, and Drop co-founder Ben Harris said: "We are very excited to announce this integration with Siri. The majority of Siri-enabled devices travel around with us, and they greatly outnumber those supported by other voice technologies. This represents another first for us."

Drop has a history of working with Apple, launching its core app, Drop Recipes, on the App Store, and later selling its first connected product, Drop Scale, a Bluetooth kitchen scale, in all Apple Stores in the US and Canada when it was launched in 2014.

Looks like it’s just the start. More than 17 million appliances will be ‘Powered by Drop’, the company said. Siri will ultimately interact with all of them, allowing users to control their appliances whilst keeping their hands free for cooking. "The kitchen is the place in our homes that can reap the biggest benefits from voice technology," said Harris.

Head of product Mark Wheatley added: "We chose Siri for our voice control because it excels in the two most important aspects: ubiquity and privacy. In sharing Apple’s dedication to security, Siri ensures greater privacy for our end users as all processing of Siri shortcuts happens directly on the device and not in the cloud.

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“To help our users get the most of voice activation in the kitchen, one of our main criteria was how well the voice assistant performed in terms of accuracy of voice recognition. In comparison to Google Assistant, Siri won outright in head-to-head comparisons for the command category — which is precisely where our needs lie.”

Where both Apple and Google claim their voice assistants are available on over 500 million devices (mostly smartphones), Apple also claims 500 million devices have actually used Siri, rather than just having it exist on the device.

A 2018 consumer report on voice assistants used on smartphones showed the following market shares’ Apple Siri 44%; Google Assistant 30%; Amazon Alexa 17%; Samsung Bixby 4%; and Microsoft Cortana 4%.