I am very pleased you posted about it and that I’m not going mad! It definitely happened and it’s exactly as you described. We also did the sleepy fire search… I’m going to test a few things and if I find anything out… I will let you know haha! So strange. I was so confused.
I’ve only gone and bloody worked it out. I found a timer set deep within the home app. I made it do it again, it made the same alarm sound and it announces the name of the alarm which, in this case was “timer”… “timer alarm”. It says “timer alarm” with a different emphasis each time and a couple of them sound JUST like “fire alarm” because it barely says the “t”. I think it must have happened on one of the many occasions we’ve said “hey Siri, set a timer for X minutes” and we’ve thought it’s not done it. But it has in fact set an alarm called “timer” for 04:00am, not 4 minutes. Do you use yours for timers? I really think this is it haha.
Just a thought - have you ever set a timer for a “fire” for any reason? Or a reminder to turn off a gas fire or something haha?
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This has not happened to me, but there are so many possible reasons:
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HomePods misunderstanding what is going on (it does not take much for a HomePod to get triggered when watching TV: it just needs to listen when you are watching TV. If Siri “thinks” that it has heard “hey, Siri” there is not much more needed to “understand” that a timer has to be set up quoting stuff from the TV show or whatever else. Like I said, it never went that far over here, but Siri has reacted to stuff that was running on TV on several occasions at my home over the years. It might be a good idea to tell Siri to just delete all timers followed by delete all alarms after something like this has happened.
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pranksters inside of your home telling Siri what to do
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pranksters with access to your WiFi (this is where the WiFi security/passwords come into place)
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a mishap while somebody was trying to use AirPlay nearby (or again: a prankster using AirPlay) - there are a lot of options for AirPlay - Play audio on HomePod using an iOS or iPadOS device - Apple Support
This makes the most sense of anything I’ve ever read around this. We don’t use the default Siri voice, so I totally buy that our voice could be mistaken for “fire alarm” in the dead of night when I’m still mostly asleep. It also makes complete sense that Siri could have gotten the wires crossed when I set a 3 minute timer for my tea and then went off at 3am.
The only thing that still doesn’t compute for me is that the typical behaviour for timers on the Homepod at our place is to simply play the usual alarm noise. It’s never announced the name of the timer, nor any words of any kind. However I’m willing to accept that somehow, whatever I said (or Siri heard) when I presumably set the timer that woke me in the night somehow set it up to do just that.
Thank you so much for figuring this one out!