[jordansmithnz]

As a HomeKit user, I was looking forward to iOS 15, thinking there might be some incremental improvements to Siri’s handling of HomeKit commands. It wasn’t bad before, but it had room for improvement.

Unfortunately iOS 15 significantly deteriorated Siri’s understanding of HomeKit in some situations. Here’s a few reproducible examples:

‘Hey Siri, shades down’: sets the shades to 99%, i.e. a 1% adjustment. I now need to say ‘closed’ rather than ‘down’ to close them.

‘Hey Siri, close the living room shades’: responds with the current shade status. I need to switch the ordering to get things working (Hey Siri, living room shades: closed)

Did someone delete a mapping file of common HomeKit voice commands to actions or something? At this point, I’d almost prefer no AI, and just a static command list. I guess I could create that with shortcuts, but with 20 or so accessories that’s a big chore to set up.

[nerdjon]

This has been driving me insane since iOS 15.

Heavily invested in HomeKit (to the point of having several HomePods around the house), and it feels like something changed and much of it I can't quite put my finger on.

But a few that I have been able to identify:

- Something has changed about how it handles figuring out which device you are talking too. I have had a HomePod in a different room go off (screwing up the room awareness), or my iPhone going off even when I am right next to a HomePod.

- All of my HomePod pairs (having 2 linked together) switched to the opposite HomePod for which one speaks, and there is no clear way to change this.

- Every action has slowed down, I can't figure out why but most of the time I get "one moment" while it tries to turn in lights or whatever.

- They added the ability for the HomePod to turn on and off the Apple TV. Which is great in theory but I have my own custom TV configuration hooked up to Logitech harmony and it will constantly ask me "do you want to control x or y" (one being my custom and one being the Apple TV depending on the room I am in). I want to disable this but I can't.

Edit: All I really want is a log. Please. A log of automated events that happen (I still don't know why my lights will randomly turn off... something is triggering it and I can't figure out what) and a log of what it thinks it heard and tried to do so I can address the "nothing with that name or function is found" or whatever it says when I say "Turn off the fan" and it doesn't know what I meant, and then I try again and it works.

[mattsieren]

Glad to see I'm not the only one. I feel like a bunch of prior working commands have gone missing or are interpreted entirely wrong. Siri doesn't respond properly to "Turn the radiator in living room off" but when you say "turn heating in living room off" even responds with "turning radiator in living room off". As a consumer, this is downright frustrating.

[Tempest1981]

Could this be why?

https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-device-app-privacy-1...

"But with iOS 15, many common Siri requests will be processed on-device, so no audio will ever leave your phone."

[asiachick]

Homekit sucks in general. Even without Siri the UI is unresponsive, broken, missing obvious features. The UI needs to show at least 3 states (maybe more) but only shows 2, on and off. Often I'll click a light and get ZERO response from the UI. IIUC it's waiting for the light to respond with its state but a UI that gives no immediate feedback is useless. It's infuriating that Apple who wrote the interface guidelines about instant feedback didn't apply them to their own software.

[stevedekorte]

“Hey Siri, close the living room shades” works for me. The problem I have is that we have both sun shades and black out blinds and Siri treats the words “shades” and “blinds” as the same word, forcing me to create special group labels for each so it can distinguish them.

That said, it does feel like magic to be able to easily control all the lights and blinds with voice commands and Siri usually gets it right.