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And, be careful, as setting controls in the Home app doesn’t replace the modes set in the Hue app, so you can have unexpected things happening. The Home app also supports video feeds from the likes of the Netatmo Presence security camera. This feed lets you see what’s going on, but doesn’t provide any recording options. As such, it’s neat to have everything in one place, but you’ll still need the manufacturer’s app for control and recording. Finally, you get devices where you can only use the sensors as part of a routine, such as motion sensors or smart smoke alarms.

Make sure that these are marked as a Favourite, as you’ll clutter up your Home page with devices that you can’t directly do anything with. Homes can be shared with other iCloud users, so you can set up one set of smart devices and have multiple family members able to control everything. Apple Home and HomeKit – Siri and HomePod Siri control of your devices is the same whether you’re using an iPhone, iPad or a HomePod. Arguably, the HomePod makes things easier, as it’s always listening and gives you smart speaker control in the same way as, say, an Echo smart speaker.

Siri control lets you do the basics, such as setting a light bulb to a set colour. Siri understands some colour temperatures, such as ‘bright white’, but not others, such as ‘warm white’. It would be nice if there were some cheaper, smaller speakers in the same vein as the Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home Mini, as the HomePod is far too expensive to put into every room in your home. Most people will find that they have a HomePod in or two key rooms, but can’t stretch to the whole-home. While the Home app doesn’t give you control over an entire room, Siri does.

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For example saying, “Hey Siri, turn off office” will turn off all lights in the matching room name. Siri responds in a friendly, human-like way. To my ears, the responses are a little neater than the more mechanical replies from Alexa or the Google Assistant. The bigger issue is getting Siri to reliably understand you and I’ve found that this voice assistant gets things wrong more often than Alexa or the Google Assistant.

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The gap is closing, but there are still moments of frustration getting Siri to do what you want. Apple Home and HomeKit – Automation Automation is Apple’s way of getting smart home devices to play nicely together. Think of it as a turbo-charged IFTTT, if you will, with faster response times. Automations consist of two parts: a trigger that defines when something happens, and actions, which define what smart devices should do. For example, a trigger could be turning a thermostat down, or setting a light to a certain colour: you get the same level of control over a device in an Automation as you do in the Home app. Every device you add to an Automation has to be set up manually, which can be time-consuming if you’ve got a lot of devices, such as lights, that you want to control. However, you can also run Scenes if you’ve got a pre-defined one that would do the same job. Automations can be triggered by four things. First, you can set things to happen when everyone leaves, or someone arrives home.

This is a handy way of turning off everything when you go out, but it’s a shame that there’s no option to turn off the HomePod. Next, you can set a time of day, which can either be a specific time, or something a bit more elastic, such as sunset or sunrise. It’s a shame, that you can’t set lights to gently increase in brightness to help wake you up. Next, you can set Automations based on when a device is controlled. So, turning on one light could trigger other lights to turn on automatically, too. Finally, you can set Automations based on when a sensor detects something. This could be setting all of your lights to red when a smoke alarm, such as the Netatmo Smart Smoke Alarm, picks up a fire, or turning on lights automatically when your front door camera picks up motion.

Cleverly, you can set the time period that the automation works at, say disabling motion detection turning on a light during the day.

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