The Apple HomePod and How Siri is Smarter Than Me 

02 Feb 2018

I’m a sucker. I bought one. We’re an Apple Music home (my wife augments it with Pandora, but I’m pretty much fully Apple Music at this point), and we’ve got a lot of HomeKit accessories. To me, that was enough to give it a shot.

Then I had this long thought about how any application that uses iOS’ native audio player should allow for Siri commands like “Skip ahead 30 seconds” or “Go back one minute”. Apple, why shouldn’t that work? I mean, when I’m out running with my AirPods, skipping ahead a bit would be super helpful. Or, if I throw a podcast on the upcoming HomePod and it gets to a boring part, why can’t I jump forward? Or jump back if I missed something important?

Then I tried it.

It works.

Really, at this point, I just want Siri to add the ability to do things in other applications. I’d like to say “play the next podcast in Overcast” and have it work. They’ve done that with To Do and Notes apps. I hope they open it to all apps in iOS 12.

I’m looking forward to the HomePod, even if my podcast usage is not in Apple Podcasts, which will diminish the HomePod a bit. I listen to enough music that being able to throw a song on the HomePod while I’m rocking a baby(ies) to sleep is a compelling feature. And it’ll sound a lot better than the shitty Alexa speaker.