I’m kind of shocked that Apple continues to sell the HomePod. They really painted themselves into a corner with that one. It does make a great speaker companion to the Apple TV, but other than that, it’s Siri in a box. It’ll always be Siri in a box, and people want that even less now than they did when it was released.
The HomePod is a big win for HomeKit setups, where Siri can be pretty stupid without it being too problematic.
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As long as they improve the latency and reliability. I gave up on it for even that after too many times walking into a dark room after telling it to turn on the lights on the way in. It waits and waits and eventually tells me it’s my wifi’s fault. Meanwhile I just pull out my phone and hit the Homekit shortcut to turn the lights on, and it works instantly.
And maybe the next time on the way out a minute later it works just fine. But I lost faith in it a while back and I don’t know if it’s possible to fix it.
And I know that sounds like a wifi problem but I assure you that if there’s a wifi problem, it’s with the HomePod. This is a Mini by the way.
That sounds like a site-specific issue, since we typically experience only a few seconds of delay at most.
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I realized as I was typing it that without any further context it sounds like a wifi issue, but I can assure you if there’s a wifi issue it’s inherent to the HomePod. It reports strong signal, an Alexa right next to it works perfectly, my phone works perfectly, all my other devices work, no packet loss to the ISP etc etc.
Siri on all the other devices has already gotten better. Maybe I’ll try it again, I simply turned off the wake word. It’s actually a pair of Minis so I doubt it’s that one of them is defective. It just seems the hardware is too limited and Apple’s interest in it too limited for them to fix Siri on it.
I do use it as a stereo pair for my Apple TV and it works great for that.
I’d try resetting the HomePod to factory defaults, then. You could try placing it in another location, but I doubt Wi-Fi is the issue, since it will be much faster than your Internet connection (which is what I suspect it’s really complaining about).
See above, it connects to the wifi and presumably internet perfectly fine, but the only internet service I can prove it’s talking to is Siri. It streams audio from the Apple TV and I can AirPlay to it, etc. It’s just Siri.
So you don’t use Apple Music? That would prove that it could talk to the Internet.
All I can say is that it really does work generally speaking, so there has to be something specific to your HomePod or Internet connection or account that’s causing the problem.
(Moving this off to another thread…)
There’s something going on in your setup. My HomePod commands for my home automation work in just a second or two, and often before Siri has finished acknowledging the request. Is it possible you haven’t converted to the newer HomeKit 2 architecture that was released a few years ago?
Several years ago I speculated that Homepods do not like “smart” wifi routers that try to optimise the wifi signal. Try turning smart features off. Also my original Homepods have static IP addresses - that seemed to make them more reliable. Signal strength was never an issue.
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and @ace
I decided to re-visit this. You’ll have to take my word for it that I’ve covered the basics, but I also hadn’t tried in a while. I did upgrade to the new architecture, I am quite experienced in small to moderate networks, etc.
But, I’ll say now that I’ve turned the wake word on again and given it a new try, there hasn’t been a single time yet that it has failed. I also notice Siri on my phone is a lot more reliable (not implying this is related, just that I noticed that first.)
I think maybe that Robbie Walker guy got a bad wrap, because his major accomplishment was supposedly making Siri respond better. It’ll take a re-write to truly improve it, but it seems whatever they have done in the last year or so even to old Siri has helped.
Glad to hear it’s working as promised finally!
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