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Brian Wis
High School music teacher. Thoughts about teaching, technology, and music education.

Apple Needs “Whole-House-Siri” If HomeKit Is To Succeed

Over the holidays I began testing HomeKit in earnest. I have quite a few devices that work with HomeKit, including:

If you have begun to outfit your house as I have, perhaps you too are finding out that Siri is pretty rigid when issued a HomeKit command. “Hey Siri, turn off the bedroom lights” works fine, but the more comfortable you become with HomeKit, the more likely you are to forget to be quite so specific. After the eighth time you simply say “Hey Siri, turn off the lights” and incur the wrath of your family because you just blacked out the entire house again…you begin to realize that this really shouldn’t be your problem….Siri should know that you meant the living room lights because that’s where you were when you said “turn off the lights.” But Siri/HomeKit is not location-aware in that way. It will need to be, and soon.

Apple could address this by designing Siri Beacons for HomeKit. This way HomeKit would know which room you are in and Siri could deduce when you say (into the required iOS device…more on THAT issue in a moment) “dim the lights” that of course you are referring to your home theater because you’ve placed a Siri Beacon behind your HDTV.

But even if Apple were to design a beacon for home use, here’s the other rub: The more I use HomeKit the more I find that I do not carry…nor do I wish to carry…an iOS device around the house at all times. When I wake up in the morning and pad downstairs I do not want to have to remember my iPhone so I can say “hey Siri, set the scene for Morning Coffee.” If I could remember to do that I probably wouldn’t need my morning coffee. I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to a room in my house and could not change the lighting, or temperature etc. because I did not have a device with me. And even when I do have my iPhone in my pocket, I do not always have a free hand with which to fish it out, nor should I have to. How is needing to have an iPhone with you, taking it out, and then activating Siri easier than flipping a light switch or turning up your thermostat? It often isn’t.

So basically what I’m saying to Apple is that in order for HomeKit to reach its potential Siri needs to be present throughout the home and location-aware. Perhaps this would be a Siri Plug about the size of an iPhone charger…plug one into each room where you need Siri to be available. Now when I say “Hey Siri, turn on the ceiling fan” Siri knows I mean the fan in the living room because that is where I was when I said it.

Or perhaps Apple could build Siri into a slightly larger home device with a great sounding speaker…essentially Sonos meets Amazon Echo. Streaming Apple Music through the home while being ready for HomeKit commands would be really useful. Here’s a chance for Apple to combine two essential home features into one device…or many more if you added things like environmental sensors.

Imagine:

  • “Hey Siri, what’s the humidity in this room?”
  • “Hey Siri, play Billy Joel all over the house.”
  • “Hey Siri, if no one is upstairs then turn off the lights up there.”

HomeKit needs to just work. I truly hope it will not go through a decade-long hobby phase like Apple TV. I just don’t have that kind of time, or frankly patience at this point.