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HomePod Mini is a waste of money, unless you like screaming at your dumb robot that never understands what you want it to do

Setting timers works well though

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HomePod Mini is primarily a speaker you can AirPlay to which happens to have some basic voice control functionality. I'd really love them to be a bit more usable (in particular I want to be able to change the app it sends reminders to) but my experience has been that they're fine for music, timers, and basic smart home control.
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> they're fine for music

I guess my age is showing, but isn't it just a mono speaker? so much is lost in music without stereo imaging. it's one of the main eyebrow raising things to me about most bluetooth portable speakers. If you're mainly listening to podcasts or playing lullabyes to a kids room, sure, but we're adults here and personally I like listening to stereo way to much for these to be an option.

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Definitely showing how deep down the Apple rabbit hole I am but I have a pair of them connected to my Apple TV which are the ones I use for music/TV/games. The single one in the kitchen really only gets used for podcasts and audio from the iPad I have for watching YouTube and trashy TV while cooking.
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are you saying you have 2 pod minis that act as a stereo pair? what is that experience like?
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Yup, its about as slick as you could ask for. They appear as a single device to anything connecting and then distribute the left/right channels between each other. I've also got the Apple TV set to use them as its default set of speakers, and that handles ARC over HDMI from the TV to send audio from anything else plugged in to them.
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Even cheapo BT speakers can “team” together to make stereo. I think it comes standard in BT speaker SoCs and that’s why they all do it.
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> Setting timers works well though

This is Siri’s primary use case, at least I assume so based on my experience.

As long as the timer isn’t for 50 minutes.

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Or between 13 and 19 which intermittently is interpreted as 30 or 40 etc. Maybe it's just my enunciation.
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+1 to this we had a set of HomePod minis for intercom and not only do they not work reliably, but the diagnostics provided when they fail are non-existent, making it hard to improve the setup.
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They're nice little speakers that also do well when controlling things through Apple Home, setting alarms, timers, reminders etc.

I'd love to know the % of Alexa Dots (whatever the small ones are called now) that are used for anything more than this.

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I have one for settings timers when cooking and playing music.

Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see anything else I would want it to do.

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At least on the HomePod side, intercom is at best a half-baked feature and at worst an infuriation machine. It uses a cumbersome voice trigger ("siri, tell <room>…") to begin recording audio, with no clear indication of when recording began and no way to know for sure that the audio was directed where you wanted it to go.

To respond is similarly cumbersome and soon you give up completely. I can only assume it was designed by someone whose parents were killed in an intercom-related disaster and has sworn revenge.

I bought a mini for my office with this purpose in mind, but it has been a total waste.

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We have Google Home Minis in every room and the screens in bedroom and kitchen and the only thing that works reliably to message intra-room is to say "Hey Google, broadcast message" because half of the time it will tell me it can't send messages yet. If someone knows what I'm doing wrong I'd love to hear it since this would be a great feature.

To be honest, I'm honestly sick of Google Home's approach to this since the Gemini update has turned everything really slow and I'm getting close to the point where I'd rather home-roll a full system myself that works reliably instead of the crapshoot that this is. Home Assistant seems to have a functionality bridge to Google Home connected devices like my blinds or cameras so I should be able to retain the edge devices but I have half a mind to just dump the whole thing and start over.

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If they're that bad performance (and terrible spy devices to boot) why haven't you removed them?
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Tried that. Hated it.
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