Over the last several weeks my homepod minis have seemed to become, well if they were ever “smart” quite a bit “slow” and “stupid.” Has this been your experience? Some examples:
“Hey Siri play the news“ used to play the latest news from NPR but now it just says “Here’s Apple Music” and plays a podcast with news in the title. I have to say “Hey Siri play the top news from NPR” to get it to do the same behavior. (It was quite a journey to figure out that magic phrase and I keep forgetting it!)
“Hey Siri play [some song]” doesn’t work at all “I couldn’t find [some song] in your Apple music library.”
“Hey Siri play [some podcast]” either plays the latest podcast in listening now or “I couldn’t find [some podcast] in your Apple music library”
“Hey Siri, [some question that would normally be answerable]” instructs to ask again from my iphone.
Each of these responses are preceeded by a “one sec” or “working on it” sometimes a few of those. Math, weather, and home kit are working fine. We have plenty of bandwidth and are running Eeros if that might matter.
I think the problem is Siri, not the HomePod minis, per se. Frankly, Siri is a mess. I use Siri sparingly. It has become a source of frustration rather than a help. And I’m not alone in this assessment:
Siri rarely fails to create a reminder correctly, or pause audio when I’m listening to a podcast on my iPhone. But it always fails to start playing again when commanded. HomePod Siri’s (mini and original) most common response to a command is “Just a sec” or “Working on that” then . . . . nothing.
About two weeks ago I woke up, asked HomePod Siri to turn on the lights, and was told no lights were set up. Apparently an update during the night (16.4.1?) had wiped out my HomeKit setup and bricked my HomePod mini. Fortunately, I was able to do a reset on my original HomePod. $100 later I had a new HomePod mini set up and now Siri is once again able to turn my lights on and off successfully about 80% of the time.
If the iPhone had any real competition Siri might have caused me to switch long ago.
I’ve had this. The handshake(?) that initially establishes the HomePod’s relationship with the iPhone/Apple ID was corrupted. Some combination of factory resetting the HomePods, either restarting the iPhone or resetting network settings, and temporarily disabling 5ghz in the Eero app to force both your phone and HomePods on 2.4ghz for reinitialization should fix it.
No, but it’s configuration/permissions, not a general Siri intelligence issue, and shouldn’t be happening very often. I dealt with it in late 2020 when the minis came out right after setting them up, and then they were fine. My OG Homepods have never done it.
I ended up doing all of these things and sort of kept doing them until I got the homepods reconnected to wifi (over 2.4ghz) and it finally worked. I was messing with it on and off for probably five hours? Anyway, this was the first song I asked Siri to play to test it:
I took my HomePod mini back for a refund because I could never get it to connect to my wifi. It threw so many error codes. I was able to connect it via hotspot, but that seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
