by Dan Moren
Daniel Jalkut on the HomePod
MarsEdit developer and good friend Daniel Jalkut on his experiences with HomePod:
Any attempt to “Hey Siri” another device is met by a loud interruption by Siri either of the music, or of the silence of the room. It’s bad enough that it assumes all requests are being made to it, but it’s even worse that it insists on chiming in even when it isn’t capable of serving the request. Just to remind everybody that it’s not configured for personal requests.
Funny enough, just a few moments before I read Daniel’s post I had my first experience of the iPhone fielding a “Hey Siri” request instead of the HomePod, even though both were only a foot or so away from me on my desk.
But Daniel’s experiences overall mesh with some of my first observations. In particular the “Siri is Siri” point: I like Apple’s virtual assistant well enough, but some of the holes in its functionality are baffling. Daniel calls out not being able to set separate timers, which is definitely annoying–to that I’ll add that Siri on the HomePod can’t tell me anything about my calendar, which is kind of puzzling.
Seeing what decisions Apple makes about the future of the HomePod seems like it might be the most interesting part of the device’s story. In particular, I’m hoping this drives significant attention to Siri–the company can get by without making too many changes to it when it’s just an ancillary interface, as it is on all of Apple’s other devices, but when it’s as central as it with the HomePod, well, that’s a different story.