Apple Homepod mini
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rafale77replied to therealdb on Mar 13, 2021, 3:15 PM last edited by rafale77 Mar 13, 2021, 10:44 AM
You might be right, though they stuck with the homepod for 4 years now and IMHO now really have a product entry for in this market with the mini. The original homepod was just too much of a speaker and not enough of a home assistant.
One thing to think about and which actually made me decide this is the native integration of the functionality in the macOS and iOS devices. When I surveyed my home, I realized I could replace 12 echo devices with only 4 homepod minis... why? Offices already have a macos computer, some rooms have an ipad. For the rarely used rooms, I will have my phone or my watch. For the purpose of home control and basic vocal assistance, this got a much higher WAF for me. It was there all along and I only have a small number of locations where the addition of a device will be valuable. The echo shows will be replaced with much more capable and versatile ipads for example for similar prices.($250 vs $299). There is no question about Alexa's dominance but... for my use case, I had siri available all that time without realizing that it was superior. I haven't even received and tested the homepod yet... I just came to the realization that I could benefit from using siri a lot more and alexa a lot less... and in the interest of WAF, a fewer number of higher quality devices is better than a large number of cheap ones.
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@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
a fewer number of higher quality devices is better than a large number of cheap ones.
Where have I heard you say that before...?
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Hah, it's a bit like French food... I will take quality over quantity any day.
It's a very similar design philosophy difference. Alexa and all its skills (and even more so Google Home) are cloud centric just like SmartThings. Moving to HomeKit for voice control is analogous to moving from SmartThings to HomeAssistant or Hubitat. It is not cloud free. It is just not cloud dependent or even centered.
This is coming full circle for me actually since my first attempt at voice control was actually to use an iPad mini and the vera 6 years ago... The homekitbridge I am using for openLuup today is that old... -
So, to do this all I would need is Homebridge somewhere, say running in a Docker?
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rafale77replied to akbooer on Mar 13, 2021, 5:48 PM last edited by rafale77 Mar 13, 2021, 12:57 PM
I didn't even go as far as running homebridge. I installed this 6 years ago and never touched it since. This was a very large thread in the old forum.
I start the bridge server with a dependency on openLuup with a 3s delay. It starts and stops with openLuup running on the same machine.
Note that there is a 150 device per bridge limit so my fork is preventing scenes from being bridged as I have over 150 scenes alone. I am also not bridging sensors for the same reason... but if you don't have that many devices, nothing prevents you from doing it. Note also that I am running on nodeJS10 without any problems. No need to go find nodeJS5. I should probably update the readme. -
Looks very simple
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Yup,
I just received my HomePod mini and I have to say the migration of the voice command from alexa to siri resembles in some ways to my migration from vera to z-way. I can't get over how much faster it is. There are some pros and cons though.
- Homekit's use of device grouping and rooms is much better used than on Alexa. I can walk to any room ask it to turn lights on and it won't ask me which ones, it will just turn the ones in the room and is able to either recognize group of device types.
- The darn thing works without cloud at all and so the HomePod doesn't go crazy jumping from wifi AP to another when the internet connection drops like the echo devices.
- The sonos integration in homekit seems to be useless. I am going through home assistant's homekit component to control them now but still can't control the volume using voice like I used to with alexa/habridge.
- It is the size of an echo dot with the sound quality of a full size echo.
- Locking down to apple music is the part I don't like and won't use. I will stick with sonos for music.
- It is fast... Did I say that again? The echo didn't feel slow... 1-2s response time is not bad but it was inconsistent and occasionally would act up with some long delays. So far, the HomePod has been instantaneous. Yup I can't get over how fast it is.
This was the last frontier on my installation to full cloud independence and I have looked left and right at DIY localized home assistance and never found anything cost/effort effective. This is the best compromise and quite a leap. I am trading in a bunch of echos... shipped 8 out already.
My setup:
Z-way + home assistant -> openLuup -> HomeKitBridge -> Homekit
Replacing habridge ->AmazonCloud/Alexa
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@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
The darn thing works without cloud at all
Well that all sounds great. You are saying that no voice data is ever sent? ALL processing done locally??
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I've been thinking about this. I led the team that operated and scaled the tech that became Siri. It was very much cloud based. Not sure what, if anything, has changed. I know guys on the Operations team still....
So I'm missing something
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rafale77replied to akbooer on Mar 16, 2021, 1:01 PM last edited by rafale77 Mar 16, 2021, 9:03 AM
@akbooer said in Apple Homepod mini:
@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
The darn thing works without cloud at all
Well that all sounds great. You are saying that no voice data is ever sent? ALL processing done locally??
Correct, it looks like the processing is local first. For all the home commands it is all local. Obviously if you are asking for news, music or weather, it will go get some data from the cloud but it isn't the voice processing. Also the logic processing is local. It relies on an apple TV or a HomePod inside the home. Without this, homekit won't fully work.
@CatmanV2, It is definitely the only of the big 3 which is local processed at the moment. The only one which have devices capable of it too. It looks like amazon is making an effort as well with their latest generation of devices but are nowhere close.
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@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
@akbooer said in Apple Homepod mini:
@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
The darn thing works without cloud at all
Well that all sounds great. You are saying that no voice data is ever sent? ALL processing done locally??
Correct, it looks like the processing is local first. For all the home commands it is all local.
We are talking about voice commands here?
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@catmanv2 said in Apple Homepod mini:
We are talking about voice commands here?
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Yes. You can observe it even on a MacOS device. turning on a light sends no packet to the cloud. There is 0 latency. As soon as you finish your sentence, it says ok and the light turns on.
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@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
@catmanv2 said in Apple Homepod mini:
We are talking about voice commands here?
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Yes. You can observe it even on a MacOS device. turning on a light sends no packet to the cloud. There is 0 latency. As soon as you finish your sentence, it says ok and the light turns on.
So what do you say to make it work?
I mean I know you'll have tested this in terms of watching the network traffic.....
(And TBH 90% of the time that's exactly the user experience I'm getting with Alexa, but this won't have been your test)
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Look at the experience from the guys on the hubitat forum. I posted a link to their thread above. The difference is quite stunning and yes I monitored the packets too and tested even with blocking of the devices from accessing the WAN.
You know when you send a command to Alexa and the ring light goes a couple of rounds before responding? sometimes 2 sometimes 5 rounds or more? siri does 0... It doesn't have time to. -
@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
Look at the experience from the guys on the hubitat forum. I posted a link to their thread above. The difference is quite stunning and yes I monitored the packets too and tested even with blocking of the devices from accessing the WAN.
You know when you send a command to Alexa and the ring light goes a couple of rounds before responding? sometimes 2 sometimes 5 rounds or more? siri does 0... It doesn't have time to.Well no. That's not what my Alexa experience is.
This is just against what I understood, what it used to be from directly creating the system (and all the research on line indicates) is the operating model which is locally it can understand 'Hey Siri' and at that point it connects an encrytped, anonymised channel to the cloud to interpret everything else.
What happens if you say something like 'Hey siri, turn on the retrospectoscope' (Just picking a word that I really doubt would be in any local corpus)
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rafale77replied to CatmanV2 on Mar 16, 2021, 1:19 PM last edited by rafale77 Mar 16, 2021, 9:32 AM
So down at the chip level... On the newer macs, siri voice commands are processed by the T2 chip. On the mobile devices, the later Ax all have a voice processing co-processor. So no that's not how it works. And you are right, if you try something not in the homekit set of devices, il will go to the cloud and will then act as slow as Alexa. My apple watch 3 is as slow as alexa and doesn't have the voice processing capability. As I and many others have reported, Alexa doesn't feel slow until you try siri...
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Cool thanks!
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After further testing with additional homepods, I have decided to take down even my echo shows so I will be taking down my habridge as well having completely divested from Alexa. WAF was a huge factor in this as she was not happy with the freak incident and the cloud dependency. The sensitivity and accuracy of the microphone at a distance Vs. the echo dots allowing the reduction of number of devices by a factor of 3-4X is also a major factor. With the few iPads we have and the fact that we use macOS as our primary computer, we will be down from 18 echo devices of all kinds to 4 homepod minis. So far only the sonos integration is inferior...
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I use a similar HomeKit bridge calling the automation hub, and I can definitely vouch for the speediness of Siri HomeKit commands. Its blazing fast
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@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:
I can walk to any room ask it to turn lights on and it won't ask me which ones, it will just turn the ones in the room
I can do the same with alexa, but do like the sound of more local processing.
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