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HomePod Mini Now Rumored to Launch in Seven Countries, Including Denmark and Norway
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Do these types of products, the HomePod Mini, for example, have to 'officially launch' for them to work in said countries? If I purchased one in the USA and then brought it over to another country where it's not supported, would it simply not work? I don't understand the limitation.
Nah, we’ve had Apple Music for years in Scandinavia.
The issue is more that they’re lazy, complacent and much more US-centric than the likes of Microsoft. The original HomePod came and went without ever being released here. I guess it’s a step forward that the dinky HomePod mini will be launched here a whopping five hears later, but I’ll keep using the US English version of Siri. Swedish Siri was pretty decent for a while, but has been super weird for the last couple of months. She now has a stutter. Not the repetition kind, more like a combo of the blocks and prolongation kinds. It’s like having your notifications read out loud by Benicio del Toro in The Last Jedi. Weirdest ’update’ ever.
It’s really easy to get a new HomePod mini today in the Netherlands, through major Dutch resellers at regular prices. And it already (largely) supports Dutch since v15.2.
But yay Apple can finally be bothered to sell them officially here I guess?
But yay Apple can finally be bothered to sell them officially here I guess?
Nah, they work fine anywhere. It’s more a question of whether the customers can deal with Siri speaking a foreign language. Scandinavians are generally very fluent in English so it’s not a big deal, but in many other parts of Europe people are more or less shielded from English; their movies and TV shows are dubbed, English is not a prioritized part of the curriculum, etc.
Then of course there’s also the issue that it’s tricky (for both the user and Siri) to have different Siri-enabled devices responding to different languages. I can set my iPhone, my iPads or my Macs to Swedish, but on my HomePod minis (I have 4) I can only use English (+French, German, Spanish, Chinese and… Dutch maybe), while on Apple TV, all languages except Swedish are greyed out, oddly. So there’s currently no way for me to have all Apple devices speak the same language.
Consequently, when I say ”Hey Siri” (which is phonetically identical to the Swedish invocation ”Hej Siri”), it can trigger either my English-speaking HomePods or my Swedish-speaking iPhone depending on fairly random factors. This isn’t a problem with my Google Nest devices since Google Assistant is bilingual, but English Siri doesn’t understand a word of Swedish and vice versa.
A tangential question. I have a pair of HomePods, the large original ones, in my bedroom and absolutely love them. If anybody owns the mini and full-size, can they compare the sound quality for me please? I need another pair and they’re getting really expensive, the full-size on the preowned market. Wondering if I could get by with the mini. TIA.
I have one original large HomePod and two HomePod minis. (I would also have liked to own another large original HomePod.) In my opinion two HomePod minis in stereo pair is close to one original large HomePod in audio quality, but the minis are lacking a little bit of bass and depth in the audio because of their size. They also does not support Dolby Atmos sound, only lossless. Two HomePod minis are also OK as TV speakers, but again they do not support Dolby Atmos when I’m watching movies on Apple TV.
Never heard the original but I sure hope it’s 10 times better than the mini. The lack of low end really surprised me. They have less bass than Google Nest mini 2nd gen. I was expecting some clever Apple engineering trick but they sound exactly as small as they are. I only needed mine for podcasts and HomeKit anyway so I don’t mind, but for music they’re too weak. Granted, I’m picky since I work in sound design but any of the garden variety Sony BT speakers for half the price sound better and fuller.
I happen to love how Spatial sounds on a pair of large HomePods. Even remixes sound better. And I have had several 6-figure systems in the past so my ear has heard reference level audio before to make this comparison. One photo of such a system attached. They’re fine for me in one medium to small room. I have a small bedroom (and a bathroom and kitchen) that I want to add decent sound and intercom to. Not hearing that the Mini’s would fare as well so far. $7-800 a pair for the originals now!!! Not cheap.
Siri Language compatibility I suspect. The HomePod should be able to not only use Siri in local language, but also differentiate between the home users in that language. I guess they wanna test the language before releasing? I'm Norwegian and I have a HomePod Mini now. Many stores have it, but you have to change your siri language on your phone if you wanna use Siri on it.
The million dollar question is then: will the original homepod also support Norwegian/swedish and so on.. if the homepod mini supports it??
Siri for non-English languages would require a major overhaul because she’s is quite frankly useless for ”mixed language” prompts -Its like winning the lottery when you get her to open an app or song in Apple Music that has a title in English.
The vast majority of songs in the Music catalogue have English titles so it boggles my mind how Apple didn’t think to implement a “listen for English when the word ‘play’ or ‘music’ are used“ feature into non-English Siri.
Non-English Siri will recognize one or two English words for an English song title correctly but then matches the rest of the English title with non-English words in your language that vaguely match the English ones phonetically, most commonly writing complete gibberish that neither makes sense as a title or a phrase in English or your non-English langauge.
Absolutely terrible user experience because she then starts playing songs that you don’t know or didn’t want her to play, or she initiates a Shortcut or opens an app when you were just trying to play a song.
Or, just as frequently, she doesn't do anything at because only 40-60 percent of the sentence was in my native language or English, and the rest is complete gibberish that Siri can't use for anything in either language. Who at Apple decided that Siri should rather "de-translate" parts of what I said and spell out gibberish instead of finding the best matches in English and my native language?
Surely it wouldn't be too hard to make "play" a trigger word for Siri to stop listening to my speech as just any kind of random request and instead have the word "play" make her start matching with song titles for songs that actually exist in Apple Music?
The most illogical thing about this is how Siri works almost perfectly if I only request songs and open apps that have titles in my native language.
Setting my iPhone and Siri to English also works perfectly so it’s definitely not because my English pronunciation is lacking. But then I can’t reply to texts or open songs with titles in my own language .
The vast majority of songs in the Music catalogue have English titles so it boggles my mind how Apple didn’t think to implement a “listen for English when the word ‘play’ or ‘music’ are used“ feature into non-English Siri.
Non-English Siri will recognize one or two English words for an English song title correctly but then matches the rest of the English title with non-English words in your language that vaguely match the English ones phonetically, most commonly writing complete gibberish that neither makes sense as a title or a phrase in English or your non-English langauge.
Absolutely terrible user experience because she then starts playing songs that you don’t know or didn’t want her to play, or she initiates a Shortcut or opens an app when you were just trying to play a song.
Or, just as frequently, she doesn't do anything at because only 40-60 percent of the sentence was in my native language or English, and the rest is complete gibberish that Siri can't use for anything in either language. Who at Apple decided that Siri should rather "de-translate" parts of what I said and spell out gibberish instead of finding the best matches in English and my native language?
Surely it wouldn't be too hard to make "play" a trigger word for Siri to stop listening to my speech as just any kind of random request and instead have the word "play" make her start matching with song titles for songs that actually exist in Apple Music?
The most illogical thing about this is how Siri works almost perfectly if I only request songs and open apps that have titles in my native language.
Setting my iPhone and Siri to English also works perfectly so it’s definitely not because my English pronunciation is lacking. But then I can’t reply to texts or open songs with titles in my own language .
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That’s correct. Finnish is not a Germanic language but a Finno-Ugric (alongside languages like Hungarian and Estonian) instead.
However, we’ve had Apple Music for years and Siri’s alao perfectly capable of being an idiot in Finnish as well at least on iOS devices, so I can’t see any obvious barrier for launch here.
Part of it is Siri, fine tuning Siri responses and sources to each country/language. Part of it is country specific regulatory approval (which was the reason the iPhone didn’t launch globally back in its early days). A large part of it is supply chain management (making sure to have enough inventory of new products in Apple’s largest markets instead of having inventory tied up in the retail channel in smaller markets like Scandinavia).
It's not quite that simple, even though I agree that she's mostly useless. The reason why it took nearly 2 years from the initial launch of the first ATV with Siri remote to Apple actually activating Siri on ATV in Sweden, was that they trained it to understand mixed English and Swedish in order to be able to open movies, shows, music and apps with English names and titles mixed with Swedish commands.
The first time I tried it, it was comically bad. She understood absolutely none of the English, she kept thinking everything I said was strictly Swedish and misheard me accordingly. Then I remembered struggling with Singstar - I'm a vocalist but it kept giving me terrible scores until I realized that it kept interpreting any kind of extra flair as being tone deaf (Celine Dion would get a big fat zero, Christina Aguilera probably a negative score). The max score was achieved by just hitting the notes with straight, dull and borderline robotic pitch, no tremolo or other bells and whistles. I.e. you had to sing poorly to get good scores.
Since I speak English with a general American accent and Siri's guesses seemed to get worse the better my enunciation was, I thought - hey, maybe it's that Singstar thing where you have to suck to make it work. So I tried talking with a super thick Swedish accent. Bingo. This is what they adapted mixed-language SWE/ENG Siri for. Just speak nearly unintelligible English like a 60+year old Swedish politician and Siri suddenly knows exactly what you mean by "Tom Cruise" or "The Avengers" thrown into otherwise Swedish sentences.
Of course it shouldn't have to work like that. Google Assistant handles mixed language with a 95+% success rate in my experience. Oddly I don't even have to use the option where you enable two languages. I have it set to just Swedish, but I can still say anything in English and it'll understand me just fine. I tried the same with Spanish, it worked too. "What time is it", "vad är klockan" and "que hora es", all three resulted in GA telling me the time in Swedish. No luck with French or German though.
Given the size of Apple's war chest, the shape of Siri next to Google Assistant is pretty pathetic. Kinda like Apple Maps vs Google Maps when Apple had just launched it and it was kind of a joke. It's a decent alternative now. I wish Siri had a similar trajectory, but instead she keeps getting dumber. Her latest glitch is that she can no longer start up an Apple Watch workout for me if the request goes via my iPhone. It worked for years, but lately when I ask her "Hey Siri, start outdoor walk", instead of hearing the 3+1 familiar beeps from my Apple Watch I get "Sorry, I'm having problems with the connection. Check that your personal devices is on the same Wi-Fi network as this HomePod". Huh? "Wi-Fi"? We're outdoors on 5G. "This HomePod"? My iPhone is a HomePod? WTH does Wi-Fi or HomePods have to do with outdoor walks? Not a word of it applies to the situation at hand.
I'm very uncertain about buying HomePod Minis, getting into Sonos or waiting for larger Apple speakers. I don't need them to sound huge, as I have a small room, but not supporting Dolby Atmos is a downer, and perhaps a sign that these are a temporary solution for Apple too?
I don’t have a Mini, but I have no complaints about the way classical music sounds on my full sized HomePod.
