Apple HomeKit Review: Siri’s New Smart Home Already Needs Renovation
Apple HomeKit Review: Siri’s New Smart Home Already Needs
Renovation
The new system isn’t reliable enough yet to get you
talking to your connected home
By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Updated June 23, 2015 6:01 p.m. ET
It’s Day One for HomeKit, Apple’s ambitious plan to
automate our homes. But it’s been a rough first day.
HomeKit is supposed to help iPhones run lights,
thermostats and all sorts of other appliances that can now connect to the
Internet. It turns voice-assistant Siri into a genie who makes things happen
around the house. You just say, “Turn on the lights,” and presto, they’re on.
Unfortunately, Siri just isn’t very reliable. I’m running
the first HomeKit hardware in my house, with hubs by Insteon and Lutron Caséta,
but when Siri gets involved, I sometimes want to throw the iPhone out the
window. She should know all my HomeKit-connected devices by name, but when I
say, “Turn on the air filter,” Siri presents a list of stores where I might buy
one.
And when I ask her to simply turn on the lights, she
sometimes obliges…and other times says, “Sorry, Geoffrey.” Wasn’t this exactly
how things went awry in “2001: A Space Odyssey”?
Apple is trying to do something very hard—and very
important—with HomeKit. The smart home is personal tech’s Wild West, and Apple
wants the iPhone to play sheriff.
Google, Samsung, Amazon and many others also want to run our
smart homes, but arguably none of them have Apple’s sway to make a zillion
other brands adopt a common set of privacy, security and programming standards.
Setting up a smart home today is hellish, and could use a good dose of Apple
simplicity.
Maybe Apple still can pull that off, but this first
public showing is uncharacteristically crude. Yes, Apple has done the work of
creating a common language for home devices—already, competing products light
up together because of HomeKit. But for now, Siri is still in the dark. Did
Apple bite off more than it can chew? My bet is that simplifying the smart home
is so complicated, it’s still years away.
If you’re all in on the Apple lifestyle and insist on
future-proofing your smart home now, you’re going to have to buy new stuff.
Even if you bought a connected appliance in an Apple store, it may not be
compatible—it needs to have the HomeKit logo. Many well-known brands, like
Philips Hue and Chamberlain garage openers, are making new hubs or add-on hardware
to make existing devices work with Apple’s system. That’s mainly because of the
high security and privacy bars the company sets: It requires encryption so that
even a hacker sneaking onto your home network couldn’t mess with your
appliances.
Several companies have announced HomeKit products (all
listed here), but for the moment only two are shipping. Insteon sells a $150
HomeKit hub and Insteon+ app that serves as the brain of a variety of
separately sold HomeKit-compatible devices, including light bulbs, plug
switchers and dimmers. Still, that’s just a fraction of the gear out there—no
door locks or security cameras yet. Lutron’s system is just for its Caséta
lights, sold in a $230 pack that includes two dimmers, two remote controls and
a HomeKit hub.
Regardless of your particular appliances, you’ll need one
other piece of hardware: a $69 Apple TV. It serves as a secure bridge from your
iPhone back into the house—by way of Apple’s encrypted computers—when you’re
away from your home Wi-Fi network. (The Apple TV won’t be required when Apple
integrates HomeKit with iCloud in iOS 9 this fall.)
Things would probably be less confusing if Apple actually
got involved with the setup of HomeKit products. It’s doing a lot in the
background, but there’s no Home app in iOS 8 like the Health one that helps
iPhones track fitness devices. Instead, all the setup happens inside apps made
by other people.
The Insteon+ app—which has the ability to aggregate and
control HomeKit devices even made by its competitors—guides you to assign each
device a name and place. That’s where you learn the HomeKit lingo. There are
“devices” which live inside “rooms” which are in “zones” (upstairs/downstairs)
inside “homes.” There are also “scenes,” which can combine devices across
rooms, like a movie mode for the lights around your TV.
These categories provide the basic grammar when it comes
time to operate your home with Siri. “Turn off the lights in the kitchen”
activates a group of devices in a room.
As any iPhone owner can testify, Siri is occasionally
hard of hearing. She’s gotten a lot better, but she still sometimes confuses
words (scene/seen, up/off, lamp/lap). Siri also doesn’t ask for confirmation
before she takes action, so I hope she doesn’t one day mishear you saying
“Unlock the front door.”
But even when Siri does hear you correctly, too often she
just doesn’t understand. She doesn’t yet know what I mean by “I’m leaving
home.” Other times, apparently, I’m just saying things wrong: When I say, “Turn
off all the office lights at midnight,” she ignores the last part and just
turns them all off right away. I learned that I couldn’t say, “Turn the lights
to 50%”—you have to say, “Set the lights to 50%.”
Isn’t the whole goal of natural language systems like
Siri to avoid making you memorize commands? Apple doesn’t even provide a list
of Siri-approved phrasings, so you’re left shouting at your phone like a
weirdo.
Then there are just old-fashioned bugs. Even a basic
command like “Turn on the lights” causes Siri to occasionally reply, “Sorry,
Geoffrey, I wasn’t able to find any lights this time.”
In my tests, the Insteon and Lutron devices both worked
fine when I controlled them with their own apps, suggesting the problem is with
how they communicate with HomeKit. On Sunday, an Insteon update addressed some
Siri problems, and both companies say they’re working closely with Apple to
make performance improvements. That said, Lutron hasn’t yet turned on the
ability for Siri to perform certain functions, like operate individual lights
or launch lighting scenes.
Clearly, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Apple
has already announced some improvements in iOS 9 coming this fall, including
the ability to understand getting up, leaving home, returning home and going to
bed. An update to the Apple Watch will also let the wrist version of Siri
operate your house.
This may surprise you: If you’re building or upgrading a
house, you still might want to choose HomeKit gear, even if its capabilities
today are limited. Despite the fact that many DIY smart-home control systems
have hit the market, they’ve all fallen short.
There’s reason to believe Apple can get things right, and
plenty to like in what Apple has laid out. I agree with Apple that voice
commands should play an important role around the house. And HomeKit has the
right structure to make devices from lots of different makers play well
together. In my tests, HomeKit got this deceptively hard function right: With
the Insteon+ app, I could create scenes around my house that combined Insteon
and Lutron devices.
One more thing: Apple’s approach to privacy couldn’t be
more different than that of rival Google, whose Nest system relies on data
collection to tease out patterns that can make a house run on its own. HomeKit
encrypts every command so that Apple can never see or record your activity.
That may pay off, as more people come to realize that their house can spy on
them—just like their Facebook accounts and Gmail inboxes. (Nest’s CEO Tony Fadell says that to be convenient, smart
home tech has to “strike a really good balance” between sharing too much and
too little data.)
For today, turn down your expectations for what HomeKit
can do. Or, as Siri would prefer you say, “Set the expectation level to low.”
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