The HomePod Mini

Since Alexa has changed the way it handles voice recordings and I don’t feel comfortable with their privacy disclaimers, I decided to retire the Echo Dot I have been using for years in my office and replace it with a HomePod Mini.

And of course there are a few catches–for instance, it’s been seven years since the first HomePod was launched, and it is still not officially available in Portugal. So I did some spelunking on eBay to have a second-hand one shipped from the US (which, ironically, was the cheapest way to get it).

The second catch is, of course, that I have gone all-in on Siri on what is likely the worst possible time. And yes, I know that there is absolutely no guarantee that Apple will bring any future “AI Siri” features to current devices.

In fact, there’s a near certainty of the opposite, especially since the product cycle for HomePods is just plain weird and Apple will definitely want to upsell you on to a “ScreenPod”.

And yes, I was very close to getting a Home Assistant Voice and going through the entire rigmarole of setting up a local LLM to handle intents and have a fully offline solution, but that would have been an additional time sink and required a lot more changes to our home automation setup than I deemed useful (or viable in the short term).

Plus, saying “Okay Nabu” just feels ridiculous (and yes, I know a lot about the Wyoming Satellite project and how you can configure wake words, etc. - I just really didn’t want to do any of it until the tech matures another year.

But I digress. Let’s go over my notes on setting up the Orb of Artificial Stupidity (which is what I initially named it on the Home app).

Although I was fully aware of the fact (and mentioned it in the past several times as a reason not to get one), it’s simply asinine that the HomePod Mini doesn’t have an audio out jack.

And I was also aware that the power cable (which terminates in a USB-C plug that requires a PD or Apple power adapter) is non-removable (you can do that on the “normal” model with some effort, but on the mini it’s soldered to the board).

Otherwise, it’s what you’d expect: a single wide-range speaker (with very good bass for the volume) with a few LEDs grafted on top inside a somewhat fashionable (but utterly forgettable) textured sphere.

And the touch controls are… well… not good. Fortunately, I have it tucked away behind my monitor just out of reach, so I don’t try to use them for anything but muting or un-muting it.

I have no issues using the HomePod Mini to listen to podcasts, but music has to be a) in stereo and b) through my 2.1 speaker setup, which has a little passive audio mixer in front to ensure I can have up to four computers or synthesizers permanently plugged in.

So I took the opportunity to upgrade shairport-sync on the Raspberry Pi that manages my office lights, which also acts as a unified streaming receiver via a little audio DAC. I also run a PlexAmp instance there, so it’s been the default “play on” destination for all of my music, but the HomePod can’t stream to anything that doesn’t speak AirPlay 2.0 (or Bluetooth).

Recompiling shairport-sync to support AirPlay 2.0 was a relatively trivial thing, but, again, it is an insanely more contrived process than just using a cable. I’m used to the vagaries of AirPlay and Apple’s silent war against audio jacks across anything that isn’t a MacBook, but it still feels stupid.

Still, at least I was able to keep using the Raspberry Pi as a “unified” audio receiver of sorts.

Once I had everything working, we began the process of training the human intelligences that were to benefit from this. For starters, I disabled speaker recognition (since I needed to have other people be able to set lighting scenes or play music), and everything mostly works… except Siri’s ability to understand context. As usual.

But in this case, it has a couple of extra annoying quirks. In particular, I have to explicitly tell it where to play music all the time. To simplify things, I named my Raspberry Pi ‘s AirPlay service “Desk”, but the HomePod needs very specific guidance to use them.

“Siri, play (that U2 album Apple foisted on everyone) on Desk” works, but given the vagaries of “dumb Siri” context handling, that also means that “Siri, pause” does not work at all from that point onward, because Siri is fundamentally unable to do that unless you specifically tack on “… music on Desk”.

Similarly, I have to be careful to avoid saying “turn off all the lights” even though the HomePod’s location is set to be my Office without adding “… in the office”, otherwise everything in the house will be plunged into darkness.

This, as you might expect, is not a popular outcome for most people.

I also had to rename my “Office Desk Lamp” to “Desk Lamp” because it was getting tedious to say “Siri, turn on the desk lamp” and have it say there was no such thing in my home, even though both the HomePod and the lamp are configured to “be” in the office.

These are all things I was mentally prepared for, since I have been using Siri with my Apple Watch and iPhone for many years now and Stockholm Syndrome nearly prevents me from pointing out, yet again, that the experience of using Siri for anything inside the home has, if anything, been thoroughly and consistently this bad since the very beginning–and, again, I have zero hope of Apple ever fixing it properly.

But hey, we can get it to work and I trust Apple a lot more than I trust Alexa, so even though I am still sore about the loss of the Echo Dot’s audio jack and the inability to stream any of my Plex music to the HomePod I’m telling myself it’s all worth it because I get to rebuild all my playlists on Apple Music.

Which is kind of what Eddie Cue wanted all along, no?