Is HomePod and Siri the future JARVIS of home automation?

At WWDC 2017 Apple made a pretty big announcement about the future direction of music in your home with the unveiling of ‘HomePod’ a high end speaker with an array of smart technology to fill your house with the best sound possible, based on your room specs and room dynamics.

The big focus here was how amazing the music and sound will be coming from this fairly unobtrusive speaker, it can be linked to more of itself to up the anti on sound and be utilised in different rooms of the house to ensure that the space that you are currently occupying is filled with your favourite sounds (yes it can play different things in different rooms too, so the kids will be well catered for too).

What was far less of a focus was it’s ability to be the central hub of your smart home, I expect that will be left for after the initial launch in December. My opinion on this is not that Apple have overlooked this in what was a very full WWDC announcement schedule, but rather that Apple has always had at it’s core it’s music and iTunes heritage. Smart home control has only occupied the space for Apple over the past 3 years since it released its limited function HomeKit in iOS8. In a way the last 3 years has been paving the way for the release of HomePod which I see as not just a great quality speaker (although I very much welcome that) but what is the centre of your truly smart home.

iOS11 sees the relaxing of the rules and regulations for manufacturers of smart home devices, so expect to see a flood of devices hitting the shelves in 2018 with the coveted ‘HomeKit enabled’ emblem emblazoned on the product. To find out all of the massive HomKit changes in iOS11 click here.

My bet is that by mid 2018 once the Apple juganaught roles it’s HomePod out to it’s faithful followers they will turn their attention to what this little ‘magic’ device can actually do for you with improved Siri capabilities and with developers getting creative with the smart home apps that are flooding into the App Store.

As usual Apple have let Google Home and Amazon Echo push their products out whilst they sit back and watch the market and decide what their own killer version HomePod can actually do to truly enhance your life within your home.

If you are an Ironman fan then I’m sure JARVIS is coming in the form of HomePod or HomePod 2. Will you be purchasing a HomePod at release?