![]() ![]() It's brilliant to be able to walk through the door, say 'Hey Siri, I'm home!' and all the lights you've set up blink up because your lamps have smart plugs. Setting up something like a smart plug or smart light is as simple as scanning the code on the device from your phone or tablet and having it added into the mix - once that's done, you're able to control it with your voice. It's long overdue.Īpple's smart home ecosystem is called HomeKit (if you've not heard of it yet) and controlled primarily through the Home app on your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch generally. The good news is that an update is coming to remedy this, one that will let you set multiple timers via the HomePod. but, as another example, you can only set one timer, and a lot of people like to have multiple options when cooking. Yes, you can create to-do lists, play music, set a timer etc. Without the ability to connect to other services, you wonder if the Apple stable is enough. Sure, these are mostly just little kinks in the system, but for the money we'd expect the experience to be flawless from the off.Īnd that's kind of the way this speaker feels – still in beta mode, even months after launch. There are some kinks here – when we first asked for sports news it started playing just that, but from the day before. You can ask it to play the news when you wake, and after a while it will save your preferred station too. That begins within the speaker, and as an alarm clock the HomePod also needs some work, as it's only got a single tone to rouse you with, and you can't ask Siri to play the news instead. Siri's capability isn't just to respond to your words – it's also the conduit to controlling your smart home. We found the sound quality, and speaker pickup, very good throughout testing. You can also now make calls directly from the HomePod. We actually called her 'Sizzle' one day in a low, low moment.Īpple recently announced a HomePod update (opens in new tab), adding a way to search for lyrics, additional Siri languages (Spanish and Canadian French) and a feature that allows you to set timers. even telling Siri we didn't like it didn't change the genre.Īnother thing we noted in our time testing the speaker: we wish we could change 'Hey Siri' to something else. Things like asking Siri to 'play some wake up music' in the morning and it spitting out country sounds – it's energetic, yes, but nowhere in our thousands-strong music catalogue is there any such music. There are still some gremlins in the discovery engine that we imagine will take a few weeks of music playback to iron out. ![]() ![]() One of the things Apple is pushing hard is the ability of the HomePod to help you discover the music you like, for it to get smarter over time.Īsking it to do that did yield new tunes that we enjoyed, although they were songs from artists we already had in our library. This was most annoying when you play music late at night and the volume was a bit loud, and saying 'Hey Siri, volume 10% everywhere' didn't seem to have the right effect. Sometimes the volume would alter on one, or both, or neither it seemed. We did note that when using two speakers, controlling the volume of them both was very hit-and-miss. This doesn't just extend to music either – you can say 'Hey Siri, play the latest episode of the Football Ramble podcast' and Siri will search the catalogue and oblige. You can add tracks, skip forward or back or even rewind a few seconds just by asking it, and that will work flawlessly. The natural language means there's very little barrier to getting comfortable with speaking to your HomePod, so you can say 'Hey Siri, shuffle my Just Songs playlist' and it'll know what you mean. our biggest worry would be a cat pulling this heavy speaker onto itself.įor day-to-day interactions, Siri is great and rather intuitive. The 'acoustic mesh' is pretty animal friendly.
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