HomeKit: Everything You Need to Know

[hipnetic]

So now you're locked into Google's ecosystem. No matter which one you go with you need to just pick one and stick with it. Admittedly I have never used Google Home, but Siri/HomeKit is better than Alexa by a good margin IMO.

Can you elaborate on why you think Siri/HomeKit is so much better than Alexa? I haven't seen that with my personal experience.

 

[bbednarz]

Can you elaborate on why you think Siri/HomeKit is so much better than Alexa? I haven't seen that with my personal experience.

HomeKits UI is just clean and easy to understand. I admit I have not ventured into the Alexa app in a couple months so there very well may be a better version than what was there before. Siri is faster in my experience and it really isn't close. With Alexa I would get errors commonly, but with Siri it seems much much more stable. With Siri I can say "Turn off the living room and kitchen". It will understand and execute this command. I was not able to do this with Alexa, but again its been a few months so that could have changed. The biggest thing is probably that it comes with the phone and is just built into everything right off the hop. I am not much of a tinfoil hat kind of guy, but I do trust Apple over Amazon.

FWIW I do think Alexa has some advantages. I LOVE that you don't need to hear from her. When I tell the fan to turn off it'll just give me a little ding when it is done, but with Siri she's gotta give me a whole spiel sometimes. At first it was cute, but after you hear the same thing over and over it gets annoying.

I also think Alexa's better at noticing when one Echo picks up a command, this is more HomePod specific. A lot of times when I tell Siri in the kitchen to stop a timer it will stop the timer, but the living room HomePod will tell me "There are no timers on HomePod".

Also, Amazon has damn near perfected their devices so that they do not reply when someone says "Alexa" on the tv. HomePod has a tendency to pick things up from the tv. This is fairly rare, but a nuisance none the less.

I feel like these things that Amazon has employed with Alexa are things that will come to Siri over time and most are just issues with HomePod itself. Alexa is undoubtedly more 'intelligent' than Siri in that you can ask it next to anything you want and it'll come back with a response, but I use the smart assistants so seldomly for this kind of thing that I really don't care about the fancy questions.

That was a bit of a mouthful. Sorry.

 

[DMinTX]

I would like to use HomeKit in my home. I have a wink hub which is not compatible with HomeKit. Also a nest thermostat which I can’t use as well. Most the products that could be use with HomeKit is a bit expensive.

Per the two company’s websites,
Nest Learning Thermostat: $249
Ecobee 3 Lite Thermostat: $169

 

[Dominicanyor]

Per the two company’s websites,
Nest Learning Thermostat: $249
Ecobee 3 Lite Thermostat: $169

I purchase my nest from eBay. I did not paid regular price. Is been over a year now and it’s been working like a champ!

 

[name99]

HomeKit devices are too expensive

Compared to what?
Yes, you can get cheaper versions of most of these items, that superficially look like the same thing. But almost every time I've tried that I've been very disappointed. It's not "the same" if it performs quite a bit worse...

For example Nest Cameras look like a fine product that's not HomeKit. And sure, they work well NOW. But it took them three years to get geofencing working properly...
Blink Cameras are another product that's surprisingly cheap and works very well if it meets your needs. But once again, no geo-fencing; if you want that you'll need to set up an IFFT task, and there's one more thing to fail when you leave/return to the house.

One thing I like about HomeKit aware stuff is that getting it through Apple is something of a quality control filter. If they can do that, then at least I can be fairly confident that they're not utter morons, that BASIC functionality is there, like firmware updates, or working correctly after losing power.
With generic IoT stuff, it's an amazing (and depressing) fact that you can't even assume those absolute basics.
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We're an Apple family. iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, Apple Watches. And I appreciate the priority that Apple puts on privacy. But...

I use Alexa for all of my smart-home functionality. HomeKit is behind functionality-wise, certain device types are hard to find or too expensive (e.g., cameras), and they have no similarly-priced equivalent to the Echo Dot. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that Siri is the most awful of all of the "smart" assistants I've ever tried out. I even have a CarPlay head unit in my car (that I added afterwards) and Siri frustrates me more often than it gets any request right.

Whoever is in the "lead" on these things can change, so I do make it a priority to *try to* buy devices that are compatible with all 3 standards (Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Assistant, or whatever Google calls it). So one of my first purchases was a few Lutron Caseta smart-dimmers and the Lutron hub. It works with all three standards. Sadly, Lutron absolutely rapes you on the price of their smart-dimmers, and over 2 years later, they're still charging about $60 for each dimmer. I can only imagine the profit margin they're making on those things. Leviton was too late to the party. They are pricing theirs a bit lower, but I don't want to have two different style dimmers around my house, as that will just make for an inconsistent (poor) user experience, so I'm stuck with the Lutron Casetas until we change houses.

Similarly, I also bought the ecobee thermostats (I have 4 zones, so I had to buy 4 - ugh). I liked the style of the Nest thermostats better, but I went with the ecobee because it supported all 3 standards. The little remote temperature sensors were a nice feature, too.

When it came to buying smoke/CO2 detectors, though, I just bought the Nest models. Other options at the time had mixed reviews, and I figured I'll never need to "control" my smoke detectors via Alexa or Siri, anyway. So long as it had an iOS app that could alert me to issues, that was good enough.

I also have a couple of Wyze cameras. They're super-cheap, are constantly being upgraded, and even work with my Echo Spot (which, again, is another neat device that Apple doesn't offer anything to compete with). The Spots are a little too price to put in every room of my house, and I honestly don't need a screen in every room anyway, so the other rooms get Echo Dots, which are super-cheap at $30 or whatever. Again, Apple offers nothing to compete with this, and even if they did, I don't think I'd enjoy dealing with Siri.

If you're all wearing Apple watches, why do you feel a need for Spots and Dots if I might ask? Not trying to be combative, I just don't understand this. EVERY use case people tell me for how great Alexa is (in all its various speaker forms) seems to me something I can do more easily on my watch. I don't just mean that I can use the UI on the watch (though some things are more easily done using a watch UI...) But even spoken things, I can just speak to my wrist.

OK, if you prefer Alexa voice recognition, or believe that Amazon skills are easy to use, fine. But the actual UI choice of "talk to wrist" vs "talk to speaker that [hopefully] is in the room I'm in", that seems like a no-brainer to me.

(To be honest I feel the same way about HomePod. I guess it's OK that Apple put Siri in them, but that seems to me mostly pointless for the sorts users who will buy HomePod --- they already have aWatches --- and selling the thing as though the Siri interface were THE primary feature seems to me bizarre. I'd have sold it as "here's a really high quality speaker for the price, that works with all your other Apple stuff. [And by the way, in tiny letters, there's a mic in it so you can use Siri on it on the rare occasions when that's more convenient.]")

 

[dilbert99]

4) iPad and AppleTV would fight for control (Turns lights off and the other will turn them back on)

Hmmmm!!!!

I have created a group of 4 Ikea scene buttons. Setting up the single press with a scene in homekit works great but not as a toggle - not so great.
So learned how to write a toggle shortcut - if light off, turn on, else turn off...
But now it mostly does a duplicate action.
I then read that restarting the apple tv would fix it and sure enough it did for a few minutes - yup while it most likely couldn't be responding because it was restarting (unless it had a homekit hub in it that was always on including during a restart.

So I investigated more and saw that someone suggested turning homekit icloud of in phone and that seemed to make the toggle work - but then in the position that opening homekit app on iphone, says I need to turn that setting back on.

Surely Apple would have figured out how to "debounce" between hubs (iPhone/iPad/AppleTV), unless I am missing some other way to fix duplicate events?

 

[dilbert99]

Homekit is far from new so this article was not useful to me but rather serves as a guide and not an article. I'd rather see a "How to fix Homekit" guide.

I'd agree, come on Apple, I have both an iPhone and AppleTV responding to HomeKit toggle shortcuts - how do I fix this without turning off homekit support on my iPhone?

It would be helpful to see the logs of what is going on so I can troubleshoot this, but Apple thinks I don't need to see them so doesn't make them available.

And while I am at it, why on earth does Apple think it is a good idea to have the button to cancel an Alarm or Timer in different places. That means I have to put my glasses on to read the buttons.

 

[BlueCreek]

How do I fix the hanging requests where Siri just responds with ‘on it…’ ‘still working…’ hmm…it’s taking too long’ then just gives up.

I was looking to expand my HomeKit devices but it’s currently useless so I’m going down the Alexa / Google home route instead and probably selling all of my HomePods.