Simple question, but no good solution.
How do you name your HomeKit devices? One likely has multiple airplay speakers in multiple rooms, a lamp in each room, …
What should i name them, to make usage via Siri as simple as possible? Using Peter, Bob, Tarzan, Jane, … to have unique names for each would work but not make much sense. Using Speaker Lounge and assign it to the room Lounge would be redundant and repetitive.Is there a solution to this?
I do boring:
Study back
Study front
and so on
And the room ist study - that is what I am doing at the moment. SO the speaker would be Study speaker?
I normally name devices as per the room & location to make setup & management easier, so for the office there is:
I wouldn’t refer to these individually, as they are assigned to the room “office”, I just ask Siri to turn on the office lights.
In your instance, if you’ve created a room called “study” and assigned the relevant airplay devices to that room, then I think you could just say “hey Siri, play Mac Power Users Podcast in the Study”.
I find it doesn’t matter so much what an individual device (e.g., light) is called, because I aggregate devices into Rooms or segments of Rooms. My automation turns rooms on/off. “Rooms” of course are virtual. I have automation for the room “Morning Lights” that turns on lamps in three different parts of the house at 0430.
Sometimes descriptively (Globe Light, Up Light), sometimes by location (Sliding Door Lightstrip, TV Lightstrip), sometimes arbitrarily (Kitchen Ceiling Light 1, Kitchen Ceiling Light 2).
Wouldn’t that rather be a Scene “Morning Lights”?
So it all boils down, to how they are used. But the Unit is the device (lamp, speaker, HomePod, …) and they are “for convenience” grouped into rooms (to e.g. switch off everything in a room - very useful to switch off the lights and a radio and a fan in the same room with a single command).
So I don’t have to feel ‘bad’ by naming then “Speaker Lounge” and to put them into the room “Lounge”.
I usually put the name of the room as the start of the device name. That way when I break something (beta life!), it’s easy to move things back to the right room - and the Home app hides the name of the room from the device anyway.
I did something similar for my living room lights, i.e. Living Room Tall
Living Room Bookshelf
Etc.
Ah - that’s it. In some cases the room disappeared and in some it didn’t. So I have to put it in front - good tip. Thanks.
In my case - Room is tidy. Speakers are Back and Front. So the Home app seems Study Back and Study Front
Hope that makes sense (it does to me but I’m me 