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.