A couple of weeks ago I talked about how wonderful Siri and HomeKit was working out for our home automation projects.
It was all a lie.
Our HomePods are frequently telling us “no home hubs can be found” only to find a hub 10 minutes later. If I tell Apple Music to play a song on HomePod A and HomePod B for a few minutes, it’s going to do everything on both those HomePods until the end of time. Two days later I ask for ambient sounds for sleeping and they’re playing all over the house, even though they should only be playing in the bedroom. The only way to rectify this is to play a song on HomePod A and HomePod B and then stop playing on HomePod B. That’s fun at 3:00 AM after a few drinks.
My husband and I can watch devices randomly jump from room to room in real time on the Home app on our phones. They literally jump around every 10 minutes. Everybody is in the default room, nothing is in the default room, everyone take your places.
So, on the other hand, Alexa is starting to work much better for us. The application UI is awful, but the functionality is more reliable.
This is where I was at. HomePod simply could not manage even simple tasks within the Apple ecosystem which are clearly stated to be within its skill set. Meanwhile Alexa telling SONOS to tell Plex to play anything in my library gets served up with zero problems. I have no idea how Apple can have billions upon billions of dollars but can’t make their stuff work right any more.