Five reasons to create a HomeKit (HomePod) smart home

I have recently written about my reasons for creating an Alexa-based smart home, but that is not the full picture. I also have HomeKit in my smart home, and I am uniquely placed to compare the two. So to help you decide for your smart home, I have five reasons Siri and a HomePod make a great smart home assistant.

I focus more on what the assistant can do here rather than the devices as both assistants control all the standard stuff in terms of lights, switches, and TVs.

Having run both Alexa and Siri in my home for over 2 years, I have found advantages to both but know having both is not always an option. Here are my five reasons to choose Apple’s HomeKit and Siri.

Personal responses

One thing Alexa is not great at is personal responses, yes you can set up an Amazon account for each person but I, personally, found the responses are not that great and worse, if the person detected is not know it defaults to the first user setup.

With Siri, voice detection is great and almost everything is personalised to the user that is speaking. Siri will also confirm your name in her reply when delivering something personal to you. This is then taken a step further with voices Siri does not recognise been handled as “HomePod user” protecting your privacy and your music recommendations from someone’s strange requests.

The Apple ecosystem

As you can imagine, everything works together and everything syncs. Siri on HomePod can send text messages, make calls and even read your messages backs when your iPhone is on the same network. In addition to this, she can add reminders and take notes to the default Apple apps.

What makes the ecosystem mighty, however, is apps that work with Hey Siri on your iPhone will also work with Siri on your HomePod as long as your iPhone is nearby. I use this a lot for Things 3, my task manager of choice. With Siri listening in all the main areas of my house, I can just call out a task as it comes to mind and have it saved in my trusted system.

Finally, a feature I have found my wife using is the calendar. You can have Siri add events to your iCloud calendar with surprising accuracy and efficiency with natural language processing that the calendar app itself doesn’t support.

Powerful automations

Once you have a HomePod (or Apple TV) it acts as a Home Hub for your smart home and allows for some seriously powerful automations to take place. I have a few setup based on location of family members. For example, when anyone arrives at home, turn the garden lights on to greet them and if they are the first person to arrive at home also turn on the inside lights when the kitchen light sensor detects it is dark.

This is also taken a step further with Siri Shortcuts on iPhone, allowing you to do a hole lot of things based on actions taken on your phone, notifications from apps or even messages from people. Another automation I have set up is when the grandparents are about to arrive (based on Apple Maps ETA sharing) send an intercom to all speakers announcing Grandma is here.

The Home app

This feature is useable without a HomePod if you also have an Apple TV or a Philips Hue Bridge for your lights, but it is soo good it is worth a mention here. Apple’s Home app lets you control your smart home devices with ease. What’s more is the Home app is only everything from the iPhone to Macs and even the Apple Watch, giving you control of your home from everywhere you would need it.

I have used the home app several times and this is extremely handy when you find yourself on a call and can’t call out to Siri to turn a light on. You can discretely press a button and have the light come on from whatever device is nearby. Something I do a lot in the water on late afternoon calls when it gets dark in the office.

Privacy

As you would expect from Apple, privacy is taken care of with numerous settings and a lot of on device processing. Most personal requests require your iPhone to be nearby and on the same network to work. This is because the request for personal information are processed locally on your iPhone. There are exceptions like Apple Music for instance.

I have always trusted Apple with my privacy, and my life runs through Apple’s servers, with iCloud used for almost everything I do.