HomePod review: Your mileage may vary, but crank it up for the ride

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  • Reply 61 of 109
    vmarks said: Siri is localized. If Neil is using it in US English, then no, the correct pronunciation is "paddy-oh." Using the Spanish pronunciation is not more correct in that case.
    Both pronunciations are used in U.S. English. I grew up in a part of the country where "potty-o" would be used just as often as "patty-o" by anglo English speakers. But it was also a part of the country where Spanish surnames were quite common and butchering them in anglicized pronunciation wasn't cool. People had more experience with how vowels and letter combinations should sound when they had a Spanish origin. I would expect that if you went to Louisiana, you would run into more English speakers that have more accurate pronunciation of words that are French in origin. 
    No they aren't. Did you grow up in Puerto Rico or what? I was born and raised in California and I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that who wasn't speaking Spanish. I've been to every state and never once have heard it pronounced like that. So apparently where you are from, speaking English isn't cool? When I'm speaking to someone that has a Spanish name or surname, I say it the correct way it's pronounced in English. If I was speaking Spanish (I'm fluent in Spanish), I would pronounce it the correct way in Spanish.  
  • Reply 62 of 109
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    gatorguy said:
    maestro64 said:
    vmarks said:
    skipper said:
    One correction. You can't set up the HomePod with ANY iPhone. You must be using an iPhone or iPad that uses the same AppleID as the Home in HomeKit.

    This is a major gotcha :(

    Imagine that a wife buys a HomePod for her kitchen but her husband has setup HomeKit with his AppleID. She won't be able to use her Notes, Reminders or Calendar through HomePod because HomeKit requires her husband's AppleID to add a device and then HomePod uses that AppleID as the HomePod owner. HomeKit 'steals' her device during setup and gives it to her husband in the setup process even though HomePod may be using her AppleID for music and podcasts.

    Perhaps a simple solution would be for HomePod setup to ask who in Family Sharing is the owner of the HomePod and then use that AppleID for Notes, Reminders and Calendars.

    Could this problem be caused by the fact that HomePod is both a smart speaker and a HomeKit hub?
    if the wife's icloud is invited to manage the husband's homekit network, is this still true?
    I was wondering this myself and how does Family sharing work as well. I do not use homekit at this point but when I saw you can invite others to control your home kit does this apply to the Homepod as well. I have not play with all these permutation yet. As think about all this, this could explain why Siri on the Homepod is limited due to all the what if scenarios. I can see this who situation getting very complicated, most us can not wait for 2 to 3 years for Apple to work this all out.

    As Neil said on the podcast, it would be nice if all you had to say is "i want to watch this show," and home kit knows what equipment you have, knew what to turn on and just did it. Yes google home knows you have google cast device and will turn on a show and put it on google cast. But that assume your TV is already on, and the input it set to the right input on your TV or AV system, it can not automatically figure that out for you. If you ever watch those commercial it always shows people had everything turned on first.
    Not entirely accurate. If I say "play Stranger things on Netflix on the bedroom TV" Google Home will turn that Chromecast-equipped TV on if it is off, change to the proper input and begin playing Stranger Things. But on the living room TV the Chromecast is part of the Nvidia Shield which is separately powered so it's not quite as straightforward. If a Chromecast was directly connected to that TV too I think it would work the same way as the bedroom one.
    Sounds like a typical Apple enthusiast on AI's set up!
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 63 of 109
    AppleZulu said:
    I agree with Rene Ritchie. Apple needs to fix Siri consistency. He asked Siri how much HomePod costs and Siri said $349. Then he asked the same for AirPods and Siri said ‘apple.com can tell you all about AirPods’.

    And no question should go unanswered. If HomePod can’t answer it should send to a device that can.

    https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/962714733739692033

    Also because Siri is client side not server side you end up with many versions of Siri which isn’t great.

    http://irace.me/siri
    That’s a no-win proposition, and is actually subtly worse if a HomePod request is automatically sent to another device.

    As it is, someone like you declares, “If HomePod can’t answer it should send to a device that can.” If Apple actually did that, there would be others falling all over themselves complaining that if they’d wanted to go across the room to pick up a device and read something on a screen, they’d have gone across the room to pick up a device and asked for the info there. There is actually a good reason that this alternate scenario would be less desirable. 

    Ultimately, the result is the same -HomePod can’t provide a response, but an iPhone or iPad can- but it’s actually vaguely more irritating if it were to automatically send a query to another device. Set aside the probability that it would guess wrong about which device to send the query and send the request to one that’s further away or less convenient. By sending the request to another device, Siri would be in effect telling you that what you need to do is go over there and pick up your iPad and read the answer. This would actually be a passive-aggressive response, which is an unsatisfying, disrespectful and off-putting answer from an inanimate digital assistant. Instead, by simply responding that the HomePod can’t provide a response, or that the response could be obtained from the website, the digital assistant is giving its best answer and leaving it up to the user to decide if they want to go seek out that answer using another device. Psychologically, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information” is a better answer from a subservient device than, “I’ve got your answer, but you’ll have to go over there to get it.”
    I guess I should have been clearer. I don’t think HomePod should automatically send the query to another device, it should ask first. A simple ‘I can’t answer this but your iPhone can. Shall I send it there?’ would suffice. But Rene Ritchie is right that Siri should be consistent. Also since whenever HomePod can hear you it’s the one that answers it should be rare that you get a response that Siri can’t answer something.
  • Reply 64 of 109
    maestro64 said:
    vmarks said:
    skipper said:
    One correction. You can't set up the HomePod with ANY iPhone. You must be using an iPhone or iPad that uses the same AppleID as the Home in HomeKit.

    This is a major gotcha :(

    Imagine that a wife buys a HomePod for her kitchen but her husband has setup HomeKit with his AppleID. She won't be able to use her Notes, Reminders or Calendar through HomePod because HomeKit requires her husband's AppleID to add a device and then HomePod uses that AppleID as the HomePod owner. HomeKit 'steals' her device during setup and gives it to her husband in the setup process even though HomePod may be using her AppleID for music and podcasts.

    Perhaps a simple solution would be for HomePod setup to ask who in Family Sharing is the owner of the HomePod and then use that AppleID for Notes, Reminders and Calendars.

    Could this problem be caused by the fact that HomePod is both a smart speaker and a HomeKit hub?
    if the wife's icloud is invited to manage the husband's homekit network, is this still true?
    I was wondering this myself and how does Family sharing work as well. I do not use homekit at this point but when I saw you can invite others to control your home kit does this apply to the Homepod as well. I have not play with all these permutation yet. As think about all this, this could explain why Siri on the Homepod is limited due to all the what if scenarios. I can see this who situation getting very complicated, most us can not wait for 2 to 3 years for Apple to work this all out.

    As Neil said on the podcast, it would be nice if all you had to say is "i want to watch this show," and home kit knows what equipment you have, knew what to turn on and just did it. Yes google home knows you have google cast device and will turn on a show and put it on google cast. But that assume your TV is already on, and the input it set to the right input on your TV or AV system, it can not automatically figure that out for you. If you ever watch those commercial it always shows people had everything turned on first.
    You need HDMI-CEC, which I guess is most modern TVs, then Chromecast can turn it on and off and set it to be the input device. I've noticed that's actually one of the most useful commands for Home, "turn off the TV" because either my wife leaves it on when she leaves the house and I'm upstairs working and don't want to walk down to turn it off, or I'm going to bed and my daughter has hidden the remote.
    argonautwatto_cobra
  • Reply 65 of 109
    AppleZulu said:
    I agree with Rene Ritchie. Apple needs to fix Siri consistency. He asked Siri how much HomePod costs and Siri said $349. Then he asked the same for AirPods and Siri said ‘apple.com can tell you all about AirPods’.

    And no question should go unanswered. If HomePod can’t answer it should send to a device that can.

    https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/962714733739692033

    Also because Siri is client side not server side you end up with many versions of Siri which isn’t great.

    http://irace.me/siri
    That’s a no-win proposition, and is actually subtly worse if a HomePod request is automatically sent to another device.

    As it is, someone like you declares, “If HomePod can’t answer it should send to a device that can.” If Apple actually did that, there would be others falling all over themselves complaining that if they’d wanted to go across the room to pick up a device and read something on a screen, they’d have gone across the room to pick up a device and asked for the info there. There is actually a good reason that this alternate scenario would be less desirable. 

    Ultimately, the result is the same -HomePod can’t provide a response, but an iPhone or iPad can- but it’s actually vaguely more irritating if it were to automatically send a query to another device. Set aside the probability that it would guess wrong about which device to send the query and send the request to one that’s further away or less convenient. By sending the request to another device, Siri would be in effect telling you that what you need to do is go over there and pick up your iPad and read the answer. This would actually be a passive-aggressive response, which is an unsatisfying, disrespectful and off-putting answer from an inanimate digital assistant. Instead, by simply responding that the HomePod can’t provide a response, or that the response could be obtained from the website, the digital assistant is giving its best answer and leaving it up to the user to decide if they want to go seek out that answer using another device. Psychologically, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information” is a better answer from a subservient device than, “I’ve got your answer, but you’ll have to go over there to get it.”
    I guess I should have been clearer. I don’t think HomePod should automatically send the query to another device, it should ask first. A simple ‘I can’t answer this but your iPhone can. Shall I send it there?’ would suffice. But Rene Ritchie is right that Siri should be consistent. Also since whenever HomePod can hear you it’s the one that answers it should be rare that you get a response that Siri can’t answer something.
    That would remove the passive-aggressiveness, but implementation is still not as simple as you assume. If it’s just you, your HomePod and your iPhone, that would save you an extra step of repeating the question to your iPhone. If there are three iPhones and a couple of iPads on the same network, however, does the HomePod guess which one to send the query to, send it to all five, or start a back-and-forth asking you where to go with it? The scenario with one person, one HomePod and one iPhone is pretty much the only one where you save a step. Every other scenario either requires highly sophisticated AI assumptions (and a significant probability of guessing wrong), or it reqieres the same number or more user interactions just to get to the answer. So we’re back where we started. The simplest solution is for the HomePod to respond that it can’t provide that answer, or to offer that the answer is available via the website, and leave it to the user to decide the next step. 
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 66 of 109
    vmarks said:
    skipper said:
    One correction. You can't set up the HomePod with ANY iPhone. You must be using an iPhone or iPad that uses the same AppleID as the Home in HomeKit.

    This is a major gotcha :(

    Imagine that a wife buys a HomePod for her kitchen but her husband has setup HomeKit with his AppleID. She won't be able to use her Notes, Reminders or Calendar through HomePod because HomeKit requires her husband's AppleID to add a device and then HomePod uses that AppleID as the HomePod owner. HomeKit 'steals' her device during setup and gives it to her husband in the setup process even though HomePod may be using her AppleID for music and podcasts.

    Perhaps a simple solution would be for HomePod setup to ask who in Family Sharing is the owner of the HomePod and then use that AppleID for Notes, Reminders and Calendars.

    Could this problem be caused by the fact that HomePod is both a smart speaker and a HomeKit hub?
    if the wife's icloud is invited to manage the husband's homekit network, is this still true?
    I’d like to respond to this because I had the same problem. 

    I had originally invited my wife from my iPhone to join Homekit. When I couldn’t setup the HomePod from her iPhone I poked around and saw the option  “Allow Editing” which allows adding and removing devices, was turned off so I turned it on for her, removed the HomePod from th Home App and tried again and it still would not allow her iPhone to setup the device.  Note that the message on her iPhone explicitly says it must be the “owner” or the home defined in homekit. Up until then I didn’t realize there was such a think and the owner. 

    The other odd thing is that the third HomePod video on the Apple YouTube channel explicitly says removing the HomePod from homekit allows another user to setup the device. 
    edited February 2018
  • Reply 67 of 109
    AppleZulu said:
    AppleZulu said:
    I agree with Rene Ritchie. Apple needs to fix Siri consistency. He asked Siri how much HomePod costs and Siri said $349. Then he asked the same for AirPods and Siri said ‘apple.com can tell you all about AirPods’.

    And no question should go unanswered. If HomePod can’t answer it should send to a device that can.

    https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/962714733739692033

    Also because Siri is client side not server side you end up with many versions of Siri which isn’t great.

    http://irace.me/siri
    That’s a no-win proposition, and is actually subtly worse if a HomePod request is automatically sent to another device.

    As it is, someone like you declares, “If HomePod can’t answer it should send to a device that can.” If Apple actually did that, there would be others falling all over themselves complaining that if they’d wanted to go across the room to pick up a device and read something on a screen, they’d have gone across the room to pick up a device and asked for the info there. There is actually a good reason that this alternate scenario would be less desirable. 

    Ultimately, the result is the same -HomePod can’t provide a response, but an iPhone or iPad can- but it’s actually vaguely more irritating if it were to automatically send a query to another device. Set aside the probability that it would guess wrong about which device to send the query and send the request to one that’s further away or less convenient. By sending the request to another device, Siri would be in effect telling you that what you need to do is go over there and pick up your iPad and read the answer. This would actually be a passive-aggressive response, which is an unsatisfying, disrespectful and off-putting answer from an inanimate digital assistant. Instead, by simply responding that the HomePod can’t provide a response, or that the response could be obtained from the website, the digital assistant is giving its best answer and leaving it up to the user to decide if they want to go seek out that answer using another device. Psychologically, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information” is a better answer from a subservient device than, “I’ve got your answer, but you’ll have to go over there to get it.”
    I guess I should have been clearer. I don’t think HomePod should automatically send the query to another device, it should ask first. A simple ‘I can’t answer this but your iPhone can. Shall I send it there?’ would suffice. But Rene Ritchie is right that Siri should be consistent. Also since whenever HomePod can hear you it’s the one that answers it should be rare that you get a response that Siri can’t answer something.
    That would remove the passive-aggressiveness, but implementation is still not as simple as you assume. If it’s just you, your HomePod and your iPhone, that would save you an extra step of repeating the question to your iPhone. If there are three iPhones and a couple of iPads on the same network, however, does the HomePod guess which one to send the query to, send it to all five, or start a back-and-forth asking you where to go with it? The scenario with one person, one HomePod and one iPhone is pretty much the only one where you save a step. Every other scenario either requires highly sophisticated AI assumptions (and a significant probability of guessing wrong), or it reqieres the same number or more user interactions just to get to the answer. So we’re back where we started. The simplest solution is for the HomePod to respond that it can’t provide that answer, or to offer that the answer is available via the website, and leave it to the user to decide the next step. 
    Well and this gets into HomePod needing support for multiple users, and being able to recognize different voices. I would argue HomePod is not a personal device so this support is necessary. Of course they should bring multi user support to iPad along with it. Of course I’m coming at this from the perspective of Apple wanting to design the best devices/experiences. 
    cropr
  • Reply 68 of 109
    nhughes said:
    nhughes said: HomePod isn’t even available in Spanish speaking countries. While I appreciate your insight and background on the word patio, the argument regarding how she pronounces it is ultimately pedantic — Siri mispronounces a lot of things, regardless of the origin of the word. 
    It's not pedantic when the article specifically uses the pronunciation of patio as if it were an obvious error. It's not.  
    Oh Lord. Let it go. 
    If you wouldn’t have said it I would have..he has been hung up on this since the first post.  I haven’t finished reading thru all other comments but hope this is done.  Great job on article btw...
  • Reply 69 of 109
    chasmchasm Posts: 3,273member
    Obviously this is a very sincere review from a real HomePod owner, I've been paying attention to those. The things Neil singled out as the biggest issues, it seems to me, could all be fixed in future software updates, so I'm not particularly concerned about them -- to me it is obvious that you will eventually be able to set up a HomePod with an Android phone, since you can subscribe to Apple Music on those devices (as an example), but its not here yet. The first year, I predict, will bring a number of software updates to HomePod (starting this spring).

    I agree with Foggyhill that this review's overall score should have been broken out, primarily because of the "potential" as Neil called it. From every review I've seen, the speaker is a 4.5 or 5 out of five, and Siri is a 2.5 or 3 out of five. Since Siri will do nothing but grow (though I very much doubt it will ever be on par with the iOS version, since it's not really intended to do so), breaking the score out in this manner makes it clearer to skimmers who don't read much or any of the article that if you're buying it for music, it's a great deal for the money. If you're buying it to be as much of a vocal assistant as Alexa, look elsewhere -- or check back in a year or two.
    nhughesargonaut
  • Reply 70 of 109
    newcode said:
    Puzzled  to read the comment in the review about “play the latest album by” not working as I’ve done that loads of times on my iPhone. So I tried it on my HomePod. “Hey Siri, play the latest album by Grandaddy”, and it came back “Here’s Last Place by Grandaddy”. Spot on. 

    I do have an Apple Music subscription, maybe that makes a difference?
    Everything I've read about HomePod points to it being developed primarily as a means to make playing music an optimal experience. Apple has invested in making that work, first and foremost. Other functions are secondary to this.
  • Reply 71 of 109
    nhughes said:
    foggyhill said:
    maestro64 said:
    I think i figured why siri is so limited on the homepod, i seems like the question processing is mostly done on the homepod itself verses sending it out to a server first. Just a thought and Apple just needs to crack up its capabilities.
    This also means it is actually better for home automation, something many conveniently forget.

    Also, I totally disagree with 3.5 considering what the main selling point of this thing is. This is AGAIN a desingenious review.

    The review should be against the target market, not the imaginary in someone's head market.

    What speaker this size, can be placed anywhere, delivers this kind of sound... not one... bang... 4.5 to 5 rating, everything else is just prattling and the YMMV in a review is just bizarre too.

    When this thing sells 10M inside 12 months, will people change their tune, or will they slink to darkness like with every other Apple product.
    You should look up the meaning (and proper spelling) of the word disingenuous. I am the target market for this product, as I detailed in the review. It falls short in a few areas, which is why it is a positive but not glowing review. I don’t mind you disagreeing with the score I gave it, but suggesting I was not sincere or fair in my assessment is odd. 
    I know full well what the word means and thinking your own needs are those of target market may or may not be
    a lapse in sincerity depending on how
    much you bend reality to fit this assessment.

    My main beef with the review is based squarely in Apple's marketing push for this product at launch.
    Based on this, I believe that either:
    - your assessment of being the target is false, or
    - you misunderstand what the target market actually is.
    So a "misguided" review would possibly be more a more appropriate assessment.

    If having a great difficulty having a great sound in your bathroom, kitchen, hallway and many other spaces big and small of dubious acoustics is not a main pain point, you're  not the initial target for this product and the Apple messaging seems to support this.

    Initial uptake of a product depends on key differentiating points and how they resonate in their target market.
    In this case it is using tech to get the best sound possible out of a very small device that adapts to both room and the music played.
    That's the killer function and the fact it's affordable to get something like that (of which there are no real substitute right now) means they'll sell a lot of them.

    An example, my mother and best friend, both have Ipads and no other Apple devices.
    They are retired and are what could be termed middle middle class.
    They have been looking to get great sounding music in their kitchen and dining area and they've tried a lot of different ones and they all dislike their sound (the rooms in their houses are very challenging environments).
    They will likely buy four Homepods if these fit the great sound in a minuscule device mold. Everything else is just a cherry on top for them.

    How many of Apple customers are like them and how many are like you. Will they constitute the majority or minority of buyers for this product?

    Of course, those people are not reading Appleinsider and maybe you think the actual reader's needs in that area match yours.
    That's much more probable, yet doesn't reflect on the device's worth as a whole cause this place is a niche within a niche.

    A unbiased review should not be from your own point of view only, but in theory for everyone who is in that target market.
    This is a very difficult exercise that few do well anymore.That's what the best old style reviewers did.

    The quirks and POV of the reviewer has seeped into reviews to dominate them
    In cases like Patel at the Verge you get 100% of the time strongly editorialized "reviews"

    Thankly, that's still not your case.

    I've been reading product reviews in magazines and now online since the 1970s and it is NOT getting better.

    PS (got a grad certificate in communication from McGill so I think I'm ok with most English words despite it not being my first language)
    edited February 2018
  • Reply 72 of 109
    boltsfan17 said: No they aren't. Did you grow up in Puerto Rico or what? I was born and raised in California and I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that who wasn't speaking Spanish. I've been to every state and never once have heard it pronounced like that. So apparently where you are from, speaking English isn't cool? When I'm speaking to someone that has a Spanish name or surname, I say it the correct way it's pronounced in English. If I was speaking Spanish (I'm fluent in Spanish), I would pronounce it the correct way in Spanish. 
    Quick question for you then: how often do you hear the word "Mesa" pronounced as "May-sah"? And if "May-sah" is quite common, why would you think that other Spanish origin words wouldn't be pronounced correctly in parts of the country? That's the proper vowel use for Spanish, and yet it's totally common in English pronunciation. 
  • Reply 73 of 109
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,328member
    Picked up a HomePod at the Apple Store today. Setup was super easy. I intended to just set it up today in the kitchen and wait until tomorrow to play around with it when I'd be in there doing kitchen related stuff. Then I tried out a few tunes from my Apple Music/iTunes Match collection. Four hours later there I am still hanging out in the kitchen trying out a bunch of additional songs, moving around the kitchen, and noticing how great the music sounds no matter where I'm standing or sitting in the kitchen. I'm impressed. Kitchens are tough for audio. Probably not as bad as bathrooms but I'm not going to spend extended periods of time in the bathroom. I hope.

    What strikes me right off the bat is the consistency and clarity of the presentation within the space and the very pleasing balance between the bass, midrange, and higher frequencies. The speaker that it replaced (the bigger Bose SoundLink unit) had strong bass but the balance wasn't there and musical passages with heavy bass would sometimes overwhelm everything else. Also, the placement of the Bose with respect to the back wall was very critical. I'd generally line it up parallel to the wall about six to eight inches out, both to improve the bass by freeing up the passive radiator and to get it further out from under the overhead cabinets. Nothing scientific, just fiddling around until it sounded good enough where I was standing or sitting. With the HomePod I don't need to fiddle with placement - at all. The overall sound quality (at least for my taste of music) of the HomePod versus the Bose is not even close. The HomePod crushes the Bose. I also have a Bose Mini, which I think sounds a little better (clarity and definition) than the bigger Bose unit but with less bass, but the HomePod is better sounding than the Mini too. Does the HomePod sound better than my Kef 5.1 home theatre system. Nope. But the HomePod is one one-fifth the price and is very happy in my kitchen.  

    The Siri voice detection on HomePod is pretty slick. Not that I currently use Siri much because using it always makes me feel like a total dork, but maybe now that I can simply talk to Siri as if it (sorry guys - it ain't really a woman and doesn't give you "I have a girlfriend" cred), were someone/something sitting next to me, I may use it more. With HomePod I probably don't have a choice but to use it. But at least I can tell people "I'm just talking to myself over here" rather than trying to mentally subvert an inanimate object to my will. I tried the normal music control commands, things I expect to do with a music control interface, and it performed flawlessly. Sorry, I don't currently ask my 1970s analog receiver what the capital of Afghanistan is, or try to order a pepperoni and sausage pizza by talking to a turntable (even though it seems like such a natural match), so I don't know where its limits of comprehension are outside of my modest expectations around controlling music. I ask for more or less volume and it dutifully complies. Good enough. We'll see how it reacts to podcast requests on another day. 

    To be honest the beamforming discussions are mildly interesting because I have worked quite a bit with beamformers and inverse beamformers. I'm okay with Apple touting it as a "feature" to awe potential customers but what really matters is not how the sophisticated DSP algorithms and acoustic wizardry work, it's simply that Apple designed a great little speaker that punches way above its weight class and annihilates the competitive voice assistant products that have toyish to barely serviceable audio performance. If you want to bask in the joy of Alexa, get yourself a cheap Echo and strike up a deeply meaningful conversation. No problem, Amazon still loves you and always will. But if you really love your music and want to enjoy it anywhere in any room of your home without being tethered to a colossus audio system and duct taped into one listening sweet spot, take a HomePod for a test drive. The HomePod turns the whole room into a sweet spot and should be marketed as the perfect "party speaker" or speaker for people who move around and want the sweet spot to move with them.

    On the downside, I did find that AirPlay on my iPhone 6+ and iPod 6 are flakey as hell and crash the Control Center if I select the HomePod device after long-pressing on the Music control in the Control Center. If I instead select the audio output icon in the upper right of the Music control after long pressing on the Music control in the Control Center it seems to work okay. Just don't select the HomePod from the bubble at the bottom that says "Tap to Connect" or "Not Playing." Pressing that control crashes Control Center. On all of my iPads the Control Center interaction works perfectly and without any hiccups. I also found that I had to turn ON Sound Check for the HomePod device in the Home app. Otherwise I was frequently having to tell Siri to increase or decrease the volume when streaming from Apple Music.       


    edited February 2018 tmaykevin keebrucemcargonautmmatz
  • Reply 74 of 109
    Some people are saying Siri doesn't matter but from what I have read the HomePod is a "smart" speaker.  What makes it so "smart"?  I can guess it is made smart only by Siri.  But I don't feel Siri is so smart.  This article basically shows that:

    http://loupventures.com/we-ran-homepod-through-the-smart-speaker-gauntlet/

    Here's a quote: "Siri understood 99.4% of queries and answered 52.3% of them correctly. This places HomePod at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of AI assistant performance."

    Apple really needs to improve Siri regardless of the HomePod.
  • Reply 75 of 109
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member
    gatorguy said:
    maestro64 said:
    vmarks said:
    skipper said:
    One correction. You can't set up the HomePod with ANY iPhone. You must be using an iPhone or iPad that uses the same AppleID as the Home in HomeKit.

    This is a major gotcha :(

    Imagine that a wife buys a HomePod for her kitchen but her husband has setup HomeKit with his AppleID. She won't be able to use her Notes, Reminders or Calendar through HomePod because HomeKit requires her husband's AppleID to add a device and then HomePod uses that AppleID as the HomePod owner. HomeKit 'steals' her device during setup and gives it to her husband in the setup process even though HomePod may be using her AppleID for music and podcasts.

    Perhaps a simple solution would be for HomePod setup to ask who in Family Sharing is the owner of the HomePod and then use that AppleID for Notes, Reminders and Calendars.

    Could this problem be caused by the fact that HomePod is both a smart speaker and a HomeKit hub?
    if the wife's icloud is invited to manage the husband's homekit network, is this still true?
    As Neil said on the podcast, it would be nice if all you had to say is "i want to watch this show," and home kit knows what equipment you have, knew what to turn on and just did it. Yes google home knows you have google cast device and will turn on a show and put it on google cast. But that assume your TV is already on, and the input it set to the right input on your TV or AV system, it can not automatically figure that out for you. If you ever watch those commercial it always shows people had everything turned on first.
    Not entirely accurate. If I say "play Stranger things on Netflix on the bedroom TV" Google Home will turn that Chromecast-equipped TV on if it is off, change to the proper input and begin playing Stranger Things. But on the living room TV the Chromecast is part of the Nvidia Shield which is separately powered so it's not quite as straightforward. If a Chromecast was directly connected to that TV too I think it would work the same way as the bedroom one.
    That depend on your set up and the TV. I do not run my audio on any of my TV's through the TV or use the TV to control audio. TV's are only good at Video, I have A Surround Sound Receivers on all my video setups everything is driven through the Receiver since I have multiply audio/video sources. The only way the chromecast can do it is if the TV supports HDMI-CEC and not all TV and AV equipment supports this as of yet and the ones that do can be problematic. I personally am not interest in dumbing down my system to support things like chromecast or even the ATV to use voice commands. Today I have a Harmony Remote for all my TV setups and with a push on one button it turned everything on and set up the room for what every I want to watch.
  • Reply 76 of 109
    Just an FYI: "potty-o" is actually more correct for pronunciation of "patio" than "patty-o" due to it being a Spanish word.
    Not sure how you can say that someone is pronouncing a word wrong in their own language…
    I’m not sure I’m following your statement fully but my mother-in-law has for years, consistently said “offertunity” when she really means “opportunity”.  She is has always lived in the US and always spoken English (sort of  ;) ), so I feel pretty safe in saying she is pronouncing a word wrong in her own language.  And it’s not the only one...

    I’ve been on the fence about getting a HomePod but Neil makes it sound pretty good for controlling HomeKit which would be very handy.  A friend just picked one up and said that HomePod can hear him speaking in a normal voice from 20-30 feet away and in a different room. He and and a few friends who have heard HomePod have said it sounds amazing for it’s size.

    I would like it if Siri improved but I’m not sure how much of a drawback it is, even when compared to Alexa and others.  I have a few friends that own an Echo and aside from the occasional query asking for a weather report they mostly just use them to play music in the kitchen.  The voice assistant part isn’t used particularly much for any of them. With that being the case I’d much rather have quality sound (and also hope that Siri improves).
  • Reply 77 of 109
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    RobJenk said:
    Some people are saying Siri doesn't matter but from what I have read the HomePod is a "smart" speaker.  What makes it so "smart"?  I can guess it is made smart only by Siri.  But I don't feel Siri is so smart.  This article basically shows that:

    http://loupventures.com/we-ran-homepod-through-the-smart-speaker-gauntlet/

    Here's a quote: "Siri understood 99.4% of queries and answered 52.3% of them correctly. This places HomePod at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of AI assistant performance."

    Apple really needs to improve Siri regardless of the HomePod.
    What's your point? I can find a ton of home automation questions Alexa can't do, or can't do quick, or can't do without internet, or ... well, is it ZERO for it then.

    It's marketing as a completely disruptive speaker first, and that's why people will buy it for.
    Nobody's spending $350 for a POS virtual "assistant" when all of them are near useless, the value added to you near zero, the value added to Amazon and Google, well off the chart of course.
  • Reply 78 of 109
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    If someone is really interested in an actual in depth review from someone mainly interested in the incredible sound in this thing I recommend this review:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/7wwtqy/apple_homepod_the_audiophile_perspective/?st=jdjh9a8i&sh=369b1c1d

  • Reply 79 of 109
    tmaytmay Posts: 6,309member
    foggyhill said:
    If someone is really interested in an actual in depth review from someone mainly interested in the incredible sound in this thing I recommend this review:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/7wwtqy/apple_homepod_the_audiophile_perspective/?st=jdjh9a8i&sh=369b1c1d

    Thanks for this.

    I just did a quick pass through on the review and some of the posts, but it looks like the data that he produced from the test suite shows that Apple has really delivered superior sound quality.



  • Reply 80 of 109
    Review needs to be split. 1. Music speaker qua speaker. How does it compare with other compact speakers in the same price range, never mind whether or not there is a voice assistant. Now, rate that how many out of five. 2. Voice assistant. How many out of five?
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