I F'in LOVE the OG HomePods. The sound quality absolutely slaps for the money/size/convenience. I've got one for music in the kitchen and it fills the room like a setup 3x as large. The bass response even at low volumes is remarkable, and clarity through the whole volume range is near perfection. Many of my guests have sourced their own OGs after hearing it. I've got another hooked up to my Apple TV (mono) that replaced a 3.1 setup that cost 3x as much and somehow didn't sound as good.
I can't relate at all to the bike-shedding of Siri complaints. It's like we're experiencing totally different products. Does anyone actually want to use smart speaker features beyond simple cooking timers and controlling music? These features work great. I thought we'd already determined (4 years ago) that voice/audio was a poor user interface even with google/Alexa? I always felt this was a remarkable speaker that got unfairly panned in reviews for performance on silly and contrived smart-assistant use cases.
Despite the fact that I love these speakers and could care less about Siri, this release has me a little disappointed. I don't see much stated improvement. Kind of seems like a processor bump type release, which is not what I expected in V2 after so many years.
Siri is really bad on many basic things that they could hard code. Like 'turn off lights' become 'turning on the the lights'. There are many weird ass bitflips for basics like that in Siri that is incredibly frustrating that alexa and google are significantly better in understanding reliably. Whats even worse is Siri could hard code these basics and not use ML which tends to work %90 of the time, but bitflips %10 of the time and leading to everyone here complaining about how bad it is.
Even worse, I think Siri used to work better 3 or 4 years ago.
I know we're just exchanging anecdotes but I never have this issue. On top of that, I have scenes and automations dialed in so "Good Night" (and similar scenes) do full-house automations for night, morning, and all kinds of different things. I even have some set up so that, when my car pulls into the garage after work, it kicks off a few automations.
We're a google household but I'm interested in switching. Do you know if it's possible to use YouTube Music or do I need to do a line change and replace all of my Google Hubs?
And even if it's iTunes Match and not Apple Music, it's still a pain. Half the time it tells me it's playing the song I wanted and in reality it's playing something completely different. The other half the time it can't find the song.
I find Siri is very good at recognising my words accurately. Better than Google, in my experience, but that could be due to differences in mic quality in the various devices. Where Siri sucks is at actually comprehending instructions beyond some fairly basic commands. "Here's something I looked up on the web" is it's default response to most of my outside-of-the-box queries.
It seems weird that we still have such a dumb Siri in a world where ChatGPT exists.
Whenever I'm doing laundry, I try to set a timer for 50 minutes and it always thinks I said 15 minutes... it really gets on my nerves. I have to pronounce the individual digits to get it to behave correctly.
I cannot get siri to text my Mom. I say “text Mom” and it would respond “what do you want to say to Dad?”. Both my parents are explicitly set to be Mom and Dad in my contacts, but Siri has its own logic for determining who I mean as “mom” or something. Siri is the worst part of the Apple ecosystem by far.
> Both my parents are explicitly set to be Mom and Dad in my contacts
Maybe it would work if you set one to Mom and the other to Dad. I understand the intent of being inclusive, but sometimes one must pragmatically bend like a reed to avoid exhaustion.
I think you misread the parent post? Obviously if parent expects "text Mom" to call Mom, not Dad, then the poster has explicitly set one to Mom and the other to Dad.
But a human being can use their "theory of mind" and rule out any implausible interpretations of what a fellow human being means when they complain Siri is texting Dad, not Mom, when they say text Mom.
Yes, I work on that a lot, kinda. It’s tricky, like learning to move one’s ears the first time. When my spouse first brought it up I thought it was “theory of mine” and I kept expecting a name for what it is.
Create separate contacts for each of your parents with their real names. Then, go into your contact card (aka “My Card”) and relate your parent’s contacts, one as mother, the other as father under “related names”. This will let Siri, and the rest of the system, know who your parents are. Also make sure that in Settings -> Siri & Search -> My information, you have the right contact card selected for yourself.
One issue I have with the HomePod (mini) Siri is that it activates even when I’m in another room and want my iPhone or iPad in that room to react, but Siri answers from the HomePod in the other room where I can barely (or not at all) hear it.
This is crazy behaviour. Is it hearing from another room or is it activating via the iPhone or iPad in the room you are in? If so it would seem that most users would have this issue. Can anyone else chime in? I am looking to buy one now but this seems to be an annoying flaw.
It is hearing from the other room (doors aren’t fully closed, and the HomePod mini has really sensitive hearing) and I guess for some reason decides that it’s probably the same room. This doesn’t happen when you have the other device active/unlocked. There is a mechanism to negotiate between devices which device should answer (you see the Siri symbol lighting up on all devices), but the logic seems to be half-broken (unfortunately a common occurrence with present-day Apple software).
This should work if you enable ARC (must be enabled on Apple TV settings, and on your HDMI switching device. You also need to use an ARC compatible HDMI cable and to be using the ARC port on your "switching" device, since often there is only one such port. This is how I have it set up and my HomePod outputs all inputs that come into my TV.
I’ve used ARC with a stereo pair via my Apple TV for a while now. It sounds amazing. I can even play FPS games on my gaming PC with the audio piped to my HomePods, through the Apple TV via ARC, and there is no noticeable latency.
Therefore this also means I will have to buy another Apple TV, only the 4k 2nd gen supports ARC. I see no reason to do that :-( it works just fine the original 4K one. Thx!
I keep Siri disabled on them because of small children, and I felt I got full value just from the audio quality and being a nice Airplay target.
But, I recognize that other people have little need for its audio quality, but really wanted a non-Alexa smart voice device, and it was dismaying for them to pay $350 for a household Siri device that was unreliable.
Like you said, since the OG HomePod came out, a lot more people know what Siri is and isn't good for, so expectations should be closer to HomePod 2nd gen's real-world performance. At least I hope so.
How old were your children when they figured out they could control Siri? One of my kids tried it once but Siri couldn't recognize the voice and refused to respond.
Early elementary for the older kids and pre-k for the younger who benefited from their sibling trying. They weren't initially good at it, but I learned they would try a lot until they figured it out once they could say "Hey Siri" correctly enough to get any response.
Ah, mine forgot about it after excitedly trying twice.
Other possible "solutions" I read about that aren't as good as what you're currently doing:
- Keep Hey Siri on, but create custom shortcuts to automatically respond with your preferred admonishment for things you don't want them asking over and over again
- Keep Hey Siri on, but set HomePod volume to 0
(By the way, thanks for mentioning HN Notify in your profile. Had no idea that existed. Now I'm using it.)
One complaint about the original was that it was super locked into Apple's ecosystem, which seems valid to me. And the new one supports Matter, so that's an improvement
It’s still not straightforward to get audio in from a non-Apple approved source, like from a Windows PC. They would sell more HomePods if you could use it as a generic Bluetooth speaker and/or if it had an aux input.
Absolutely agree with the love for the OG homepods. Great sound and I use it many times daily. Finally got my Hue lights hooked up with Homekit too so that is working well. Lastly it is my TV speaker for my Apple TV.
Completely agree. Incredible audio quality for the price, and it does a good job at the basic things I would personally ever need to use a voice assistant for. Will definitely buy a v2. Conversely, totally understand people not wanting one of these if they are true audiophiles, outside of the Apple ecosystem, or expecting a more sophisticated voice assistant.
I can't relate at all to the bike-shedding of Siri complaints. It's like we're experiencing totally different products. Does anyone actually want to use smart speaker features beyond simple cooking timers and controlling music? These features work great. I thought we'd already determined (4 years ago) that voice/audio was a poor user interface even with google/Alexa? I always felt this was a remarkable speaker that got unfairly panned in reviews for performance on silly and contrived smart-assistant use cases.
Despite the fact that I love these speakers and could care less about Siri, this release has me a little disappointed. I don't see much stated improvement. Kind of seems like a processor bump type release, which is not what I expected in V2 after so many years.