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From footnote #3: Creating a HomePod stereo pair requires two of the same model HomePod speakers, such as two HomePod mini, two HomePod (2nd generation), or two HomePod (1st generation).
Siri is the main issue holding me back from buying a homepod. Alexa & Google just bypass it in cleverness while also understanding my accent way better. The only major plus of Siri is tight integration into ios.
Am curious. How often do you use a voice assistant and what tasks?
Asked Alexa today:
- ‘Can dogs eat apples’
- ’How far is it to ‘ ‘How long to .’
- ‘How many calories does 100g grams of cornflakes have’
Just stuff not worth picking my phone up and typing for the most part.
Though just tried all 3 of them on siri and only how far/long is gave me a voice answer (the other 2 were just search results).
The HomePod is the worst Apple product I’ve ever owned, especially for what it’s supposed to do. I need to restart it every few days to even be able to connect to it and playing music with Siri stopped working a few months ago. It also mixes up HomeKit devices that don’t sound similar at all.
I use mine all the time and haven’t had these issues. Just the occasional Siri misunderstanding. My family loves it for playing music and a few other simple tasks like timers.
Why don’t they stick an Airport or Time Capsule in these things? Even with the pretty lousy Siri performance, I’d buy a couple of these if they could simultaneously solve my WiFi and backup needs. I’m currently limping along with the latest gen Time Capsule and AirPort Express, hoping that Apple gets back in the game…
Because after they started winding down that business unit, those employees basically went and founded Ubiquiti.
The last HomePods sounded great, but it’s hard for me to imagine them taking off without fixing Siri. Siri is still remarkably dumb compared to Alexa and certainly when compared to GPT3.5 tools. If you ask Siri “What is 220°C in F” it will correctly hear the words you’re saying, then convert 220F to C. Because of this, I never use Siri outside of contexts I’m sure Apple has tested thoroughly (e.g. read my last text).
Again, more anecdata: I have never used Siri and wouldn’t even factor in if my audio setup can convert temperatures when purchasing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You want a Sonos SL or Ikea Symfonisk (Sonos sw/hw in Ikea design). Great products, no mic, Airplay 2 support, massive group pairing and the same room detection tuning Apple bragged about in the Homepod via the App on a phone instead of mics. (Sonos holds the patent on it and famously made no claims about Apple stealing it while asking Google and Amazon to pay licenses, aka: Apple Ponied up.)
> Sonos holds the patent on it I’m a huge Sonos fan but I think their patent was “volume control for connected/synced speakers” and apple had a UI to control each speaker volume separately. I also suspect that apple shared Airplay with them j stead of paying. I know lots of people that bought Sonos instead of the HomePod because it supported airplay. Edit: nevermind
Nope. Google turned the trueplay knockoff off real fast (as it was easy to remove) and took time to disable group volume control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve got two first gen HomePods here which died slightly out of warranty, and AppleCare wanted $300 a piece just to take a look at them. Makes me quite gunshy about spending yet another $300 on a product which may not last more than 2-3 years.
In case you still want them repaired, there's a guy online (Nic's Fix) who runs a mail-in $60 repair business for dead first gen HomePods.
Here is a video, more on his channel
And I think it works out to about $80 once you include shipping. Ive got a dead one right now - trying to decide if I want to source air gun to fix it myself or just send it to him. Less than $100 to have it fixed is kind of a steal.
Is it time to complain about Siri again? Sure is! I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old. I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics. https://imgur.com/q0H788Y The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in…
Siri complain time? Well, my newest problem with Siri is: Let's say I want to play some classic song (like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd). So I say "hey siri, play sweet home alabama" - and what I get is not the original one but some newish remake/remix/reinterpretation. Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original? Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Al…
Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command.
Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works)
1: English: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri / https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279
2: German: https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri / https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279
been very happy with my homepod mini - doesn't seem like there's many additional features in the larger size one (except for higher sound levels?)
1. No audio line-in! It's a $300 speaker, it sounds great...sometimes I'd like to be able to just plug something into it. If you have a record player, you have to have a separate set of speakers for it, because this thing won't work.
2. No EQ. Apple claims their room-sensing tech will pick the best EQ for your room/the music, but for my personal preference it's always too bassy-sounding (also, I live in an apartment, I don't want to disturb my downstairs neighbors with the bass). Apple added a limited "bass-reducer" mode, but I want more control.
3. Siri tries (and frequently fails) to identify me and my wife by our voice, and then won't do things (like turn off the music, find our iPhone, etc.) because she can't figure out who we are. Every time Siri refuses to obey my wife, and then does something when I make the same request, it ratchets up the marital tension a notch.
I should probably get rid of the thing, but it's actually convenient when it works, the kids use it constantly to play music, and I assume (naively?) that it has a better privacy stance than the competing Google/Amazon products.