Make Your HomePod Pipe Down at Night
If you own a HomePod, you know how much volume it can pump out. Every night before bed, I tell my HomePod to turn off the HomeKit lights around my house. That’s helpful, unless the volume happens to be high, at which point I cringe and hope Siri’s loud response doesn’t wake my two young children. Thankfully, Matthew Cassinelli has a solution that takes advantage of the fact that you can automate the HomePod in the Home app. He walks you through the steps to create an automation that automatically lowers the HomePod’s volume at a particular time of day. You could also adapt his instructions to make another automation to raise the HomePod’s volume in the morning. I wish I’d thought of this tip for my recent update to Take Control of Apple Home Automation.
Thanks Josh! Because of your link to Matt’s article, and thanks to Matt himself of course, this tip broke the last barrier to me finally purchasing a HomePod - just picked one up for $199 (price matched Best Buy’s sale with another online merchant). Can’t wait to get it and put this tip (and others) into action!
I paid $199 for mine, and I feel that’s a pretty good price for one. Great hardware, mediocre software. My biggest annoyance with it is that it hijacks almost every “Hey Siri” query, but then tells me I have to do that on my iPhone. If Apple would just let me have an alternative activation phrase it’d be a 100% better product.
The tips are very useful. I also added an automation to increase the volume at 7:30am. “Test this automation” was good for checking the resulting sound volumes (after the 4th go at asking for the time I was expecting Siri to respond with “You’ve already asked me that”)
I don’t have my other Apple devices responding to “Hey Siri” but I agree with Josh that a special phrase (“Hey Siri Homepod” or even “Hey Homepod”?) would be handy.
Great tip! Thanks.