7 Things We Need to See in Apple’s Next HomePod Update

While many are not quite sure what to make of Apple's HomePod, or even exactly where it's supposed to fit into the ecosystem, I personally count myself among the biggest fans of the smart speaker. Despite having several Alexa-capable speakers and even a Google Home, it's the HomePod that continues to win out as my preferred smart speaker while the others have been relegated to sitting unplugged in my basement, coming into use only for testing and comparison purposes.
Some small part of this is having a higher confidence that Apple cares about protecting my privacy, and is therefore more likely to avoid gaffes like recording and e-mailing out my private conversations, but ultimately for me it comes down to the fact that HomePod — despite its many limitations — still works best with all of my other Apple products and services, such as Apple Music, HomeKit, and other AirPlay 2 devices.
Of course, HomePod is far from perfect, and in some ways Apple's initial release of the smart speaker felt a lot like the company's first attempt at the Apple Watch — a device that the company wasn't quite sure what to do with, or exactly who it was for. Apple positioned HomePod more on the sound quality of the speaker, which was impressive but not necessarily groundbreaking, and treated most of the voice assistant features as secondary to that. This has left HomePod in a somewhat odd place against other smart speakers, leaving it with a very small market share even despite increasing sales. While there have been suggestions that Apple may release a more entry-level "HomePod Mini" at some point in the future, there are definitely things that the company can do with the HomePod in iOS 13 that could help to bring the "smart" capabilities more into the mainstream. Continue reading to learn 7 Things We Need to See in Apple's Next HomePod Update.
Improved Performance
For whatever reason, HomePod has become frustratingly slow to respond to Siri requests. It's now become a regular thing to hear Siri at least come back with "I'm working on it..." when making even a simple request, and often this will be followed by "Just a minute..." or other similar waiting phrases while Siri scratches her digital head trying to figure out what's being said or how to do it.
This was not the case when the HomePod first shipped — I rarely heard even a single request for patience in those halcyon early days. Siri seems to have fallen victim to something in later HomePod iOS updates, however, and it's something that's the single most frustrating thing about trying to give commands to HomePod, and whether it's the HomePod software itself or Apple's back-end servers, it's arguably the most important part of the HomePod user experience, and will cost Apple the most in goodwill if they can't address this.
Support for More Complex Siri Requests
Right up there with fixing Siri's performance is the need to support more complex requests, as well as allowing follow-up requests. Right now most requests to control HomeKit accessories or even get weather information require multiple commands, each of which needs to be prefixed with "Hey Siri." For example:
- "Hey Siri, what's the temperature outside?"
- "Hey Siri, what's the windchill outside?"
This should be able to be replaced with a simple phrase such as "Hey Siri, what's the temperature outside with the windchill?" Unfortunately, making such a request will have Siri apologize for the fact that it can only tell you one piece of temperature information at a time.
Similarly, while Apple made some good strides on HomeKit in iOS 12 — you can now turn on multiple lights by using a command such as "Hey Siri, turn on the lights in the living room and the dining room" or "Hey Siri, turn on the floor lamp and the light strip" — trying to do anything more complicated still confuses Siri. It should be reasonably possible to do something like turn off a light and set the thermostat, or even turn one light on and turn another one off without having to issue separate commands.
In the short term, Apple could at least address this by offering support for "follow-up requests" in the same way that Amazon has done with Alexa. Allow the HomePod to keep listening so that at least I don't have to keep saying "Hey Siri" before each command. Ultimately, however, support for more sophisticated queries is something that is crucial if HomePod and Siri will ever feel like a true home assistant.
Make Siri Less Chatty
Siri can be a bit loquacious at times, and this is especially true when listening to music. While Apple has done a good job of making sure Siri doesn't interrupt when simply turning the volume up or down, other commands such as "loving" a song or adding it to a playlist invade the listening experience.
It would be nice for Apple to provide a "terse" mode for Siri where responses are more brief for users who don't need detailed feedback. For example, when I ask Siri to add the currently playing song to a playlist, something like "Okay, done" or even just a non-verbal tone, is far preferable to interrupting the song I'm listening to with "Okay, I've added My Heart is Yours Featuring Kristian Stanfill, Radio Version by Passion to your playlist named Praise and Worship." By the time Siri is finished a mouthful like that, the song may actually be over.
Identify Songs
Since Apple now owns Shazam, it seems like a no-brainer to leverage the technology for allowing songs playing elsewhere to be easily identified by the HomePod. While some can argue that HomePod is for playing music, one of my HomePods sits in my living room with my television, so there are lots of times that it would be very useful to simply call out "Hey Siri, what's playing" and have it do a Shazam-esque identification of whatever is playing in the room.
Provide a Listening History for Radio Stations
This is something that needs to be fixed with Apple Music in general, but it's especially necessary for the HomePod. Apple's radio stations are great ways to queue up a whole genre of music to listen to, but it's almost impossible to find a song once it's done playing.
Although you can ask Siri to tell you a song title or add a song to a playlist while it's currently playing, these can be complicated commands, and interrupt the flow of actually listening to the music. As a minimum, a simple command like "Remember this song" would at least help to save songs for later, but really there should be a way to go back and review everything that's been played on the HomePod — especially the songs that come from radio stations rather than your own library.
Add Support for "Skills"
HomePod can already integrate with third-party apps that support SiriKit — being able to set reminders in Things is one of my personal favourites — but these require that you have an app installed on your iPhone, and that you have the app nearby. Plus, they're also specific to only one user.
Support for cloud-based "skills" is definitely an area where Amazon's Alexa has the edge, but fortunately another recent acquisition by Apple suggests that the company may soon be fixing this. Ideally, HomePod should be able to tie into any number of online services without requiring the user to install an app.
This would greatly expand the type of information users can ask for beyond what Apple is willing to bake into its own Siri frameworks. Alexa currently boasts over 70,000 different skills, which is an order of magnitude above the number of apps that support SiriKit. Skills could allow users to query recipes, place food orders, check travel information, start workouts, find nearby event information, and much more.
While Apple has included some of these features in Siri — things like weather, movies, news, stocks, and even basic Wikipedia queries all work — these have been limited by Apple's insistence on controlling all of the pieces.
The door could even be opened for supporting other music services such as Spotify, although it's understandable how Apple might be more hesitant to allow its hardware to be so easily used by one of its major competitors, especially with its increasing emphasis on its services business.
Support for Multiple Users via Voice Identification
For a smart speaker that's supposed to be a central point in the home, Siri is ridiculously loyal to only a single user. Amazon Alexa and Google Home both offer various levels of personalization, while HomePod not only can't differentiate between who is talking to it, but can't even connect to more than one family member's iPhone.
In the short term, Apple could at least allow for multiple iPhones to be identified by name — Check Jesse's messages or Tell me what's next on Victoria's calendar could be valid ways of identifying which to use. However, with all of Apple's efforts in machine learning — and the fact that the company now boasts Google's former AI chief as its new Senior VP of the division that includes Siri — it's guaranteed that the company can figure out how to accurately recognize who is talking to HomePod, such that a request to "Check my messages" can identify who is speaking and call up the information from the appropriate user's iPhone.
Further, since the HomePod is intended for personal use among families who can (supposedly) trust each other, this doesn't need to get to the level of promising secure voiceprint analysis. I'm quite okay with secure features like unlocking doors remaining off-limits to simple HomePod voice commands.