Help me with a Smart Home Interview – US Participants Needed

[CatmanV2]

Looks very simple

C

[rafale77]

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. It is the size of an echo dot with the sound quality of a full size echo.
5. Locking down to apple music is the part I don't like and won't use. I will stick with sonos for music.
6. 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

[akbooer]

@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??

[CatmanV2]

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

C

[rafale77]

@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.

[CatmanV2]

@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?

C

[rafale77]

@catmanv2

@catmanv2 said in Apple Homepod mini:

We are talking about voice commands here?

C

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.

[CatmanV2]

@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:

@catmanv2

@catmanv2 said in Apple Homepod mini:

We are talking about voice commands here?

C

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)

C

[rafale77]

@catmanv2

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.

[CatmanV2]

@rafale77 said in Apple Homepod mini:

@catmanv2

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)

C

[rafale77]

@catmanv2

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...

[CatmanV2]

Cool thanks!

C

[rafale77]

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...

[Pabla]

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

[Elcid]

@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.

[rafale77]

Just edited my previous post. Counting a tablet and a couple of missed devices, I am actually reducing from 18 echo devices to just 4 HomePods, 2 iPads and 2 MacBooks. The iPads replace 2 echo shows. The MacBooks are in offices which had dots. I had some redundant devices in some rooms because the dots had fairly poor speakers/microphones.

Just took the habridge down. It was a great little server to make the echo commands local and I played a few tricks in there to make alexa change house modes and control some devices which I will end up having to move to virtual switches in openLuup so that they can show up in homekit.
I also just got the latest echo show 10 gen3 to try and... though it is faster and has a bit more local processing for voice commands too, it is still cloud dependent as it still drops its wifi connection as soon as it can't reach the amazon cloud. The rotating screen is buggy and annoying... it is going back obviously as I got a low end 10.2" iPad which will serve as my alarm clock with a lot more power, better screen and capability for about the same cost. It will serve a lot more purposes than the echo show 10. The neural chip in the Apple A12 is far more powerful than the one in the Amazon AZ1 which is what is serving the siri and alexa voice processing respectively. Oddly, my old iPad pro which has an A10 without neural engine also processes voices locally and instantly.

Ahh and the satisfaction of deleting another app from my phone and tablets... priceless. I am finding great satisfaction from being able to reduce complexity and cost, improve reliability and speed as well as delete cluttering mobile apps without any loss of capability.

[CatmanV2]

@elcid said in Apple Homepod mini:

@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.

Mine used to do that, but it stopped a while back for no obvious reason.

C

[rafale77]

Found a side benefit of siri as I am refining the very old verahomekitbridge... I now get to "open and close" garage doors, locks and curtains while alexa had to "turn then on and off" since it was a hue emulator. I also found a workaround to control sonos volume using a virtual dimmer device on openLuup.

Even setting up groups and rooms is noticeably faster with HomeKit compared to doing the same with the Alexa app or webserver because of the local vs. cloud difference. I don’t dread as much resetting all my devices.

[Crille]

I love the simplicity of raising my hand and say to my watch "Open right garage door" when I'm approaching my home in my car, and if I forget, Siri asks me if I want to open it since I'm entering my geofence

[rafale77]

Ok been preoccupied with work and reaching full feature parity with what I had with the alexa habridge. I am now done. I managed to replace all the alexa skills with direct bridging with the verahomekitbridge (again old predecessor of homebridge but I didn't want to upgrade to it since I have little use of the extra features it brings... they are all redundant with Home Assistant). I have now siri change the volume of my pioneer receiver and my sonos system by reproducing all the habridge "tricks" I had in openLuup. So satisfying...

@Crille, I take it that you use the homekit geofence? I am actually thinking about integrating it into openLuup as well though so far the iPhoneLocator has served me well.