Ask Siri to Schedule Home Accessories
One significant addition to HomePod 15 that came as a surprise is that you’ll now be able to schedule your home automation requests with voice commands.
This means you can ask Siri to “turn off the lights in 10 minutes,” or “turn on the bedroom lights at 7 p.m.” It’s not just for lights either, commands like “lock the front door in 10 minutes” work too, although for obvious security reasons you can’t schedule doors to be unlocked at this point.
That said, not every type of accessory is supported. For example, you couldn’t ask Siri to schedule temperature changes on your thermostat — it would simply respond that it couldn’t schedule thermostats. You were able to schedule brightness levels by saying something like “set the dining room light to 50% at 10:00” and colour changes by saying, for example, “set the bedside lamp to soft white at 6:30 p.m.” It also doesn’t work for recurring automations like “turn on the kitchen lights every morning at 7 a.m.”
It works for locations too, so you can make requests like “turn off all the lights when I leave.” And, despite being announced as part of HomePod 15, it’s actually a systemwide Siri and HomeKit change, so it works from your iPhone, iPad, and Mac as well (although, oddly, not on the Apple Watch).
Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any way to cancel these requests using Siri. Under the hood, however, these Siri commands simply create pre-defined HomeKit automations that can be found in the Home app, so you can still edit or delete them manually from there.