Revealed at WWDC earlier this year, Apple is yet to ship its Siri-touting smart speaker, the HomePod. The Google Home and Amazon Echo rivalling offering is shipping Stateside next month, but now news is circulating about the second iteration of the device already, with reports suggesting that it will support Face ID.

The divisive facial recognition software, which has been hacked recently, is more than likely to be a part of future generations of HomePod, according to David Ho, president of Taiwanese Apple supplier Inventec Appliances.

"We see trends that engineers are designing smart speakers that will not only come with voice recognition but also incorporate features such as facial and image recognition," Ho explained in an interview with business website Nikkei.

With Face ID also rumoured to be a standard biometric feature for next year's iterations of iPad, porting the technology to smart speakers and other devices is certainly not out of the question, particularly if they wish to use it as a means to facilitate payments.