So turning on the TV and controlling it via Siri on your phone should be basic features of the new-and-improved Home system. This might seem like a strange critique, but I hate looking for remotes, and I always have my phone on hand. You can't control the Apple TV using Siri on your phone. Or it can connect a smart switch to other HomeKit gadgets, so your living room light switch will not only turn on the lights, but also raise the blinds.ģ. For instance, Home can use geofencing to close your shades and turn off your lights automatically when you leave the house. But it will add automations that your smart devices might not have had in the past. No, Home won't suddenly make your dumb lamp act smart. Home adds new automation possibilities to otherwise standard products. Next time you sit down with your bowl of popcorn and the movie is starting, and you realize you forgot to lower the shades on the windows (which of course are creating a major glare on your screen), imagine just saying to your remote, "close the shades." I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like the American Dream.Ħ. That might not seem like a big deal, but since the TV is the hub of many homes, it makes sense for it to act like it. Using Siri on the Apple TV remote, you can now activate scenes to control the house. Home lets you control your house from your (Apple) TV. That's not just cool it changes how you can interact with your home.Īpple TV is now more integrated into the HomeKit system. That lets you control whole swathes of the house with single voice controls. But with Home, Siri can legitimately do something better than me: she can close a dozen shades, turn off the lights, and lock all the doors within seconds of me saying, "Lockdown." And the Home app lets you personalize how you group devices (in rooms, for instance). It was fun to ask her questions at first, but I quickly realized my millennial thumbs are way faster than her hit-or-miss interpretations of my words. I'll be honest: I've never liked Siri much. Home makes Siri a compelling smart home tool for the first time. They can even trigger one another, so one connected light switch can control more than just the fixture it's wired to.Ģ. Now, they cooperate in a single app under shared commands. Before Home, HomeKit-compatible products felt like a loose constellation of devices that Siri could control. Apple has finally done what it should have done a year ago and given the world a central Home app that makes HomeKit feel like a real platform. Gone are the days of 20 HomeKit apps and 20 user interfaces. Home successfully unifies the fractured HomeKit platform. Watch this: Apple's Home meets the CNET Smart Homeġ. Apple finally released its HomeKit control app, dubbed Home, last week along with iOS 10, After a week of integrating over 50 accessories on the platform, here's what Apple has done right, and here's what still needs improving. Just a few months ago, we did a roundup of every app that tried to unify HomeKit, and ended up with over 20, none of them great. That cautious approach led to an initially fractured HomeKit experience. The device partners and third-party app makers could sort out the details of how you would actually organize your various HomeKit products in software into a cohesive smart-home experience. The idea was, all the developers creating cool new technology could add a little chip to their devices and some Apple-specified code to their apps and voila: HomeKit would act as the glue between every other device sharing that chip. Rather than release a device like Nest or Amazon Echo, it announced a platform called HomeKit that would run behind the scenes on your iOS device. Apple was one of the first consumer-facing tech companies to commit to the smart-home industry, but it entered almost quietly.
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