Apple’s next HomePod can’t come soon enough for one reason: Siri AI

Despite being released nearly six years ago, I still use Apple’s HomePod mini regularly in several rooms of my house. I use the small smart speaker to control lights, ask questions, and play music. It might not be a cutting-edge device, but it’s still useful.

The problems with the HomePod and the HomePod mini have never been the speaker portion. For their size, they each sound great. The issue causing the smart devices to remain frustrating is Siri.

I’ve tried Amazon’s Echo Dot Max with Alexa+, and I’ve used the new Google Home Speaker with Gemini. Both of those $99 speakers make Siri on the HomePod mini feel antiquated.

Getting a new HomePod mini with more volume and increased audio quality would be nice. But the real reason a new HomePod can’t come soon enough is Apple’s new Siri AI, debuting with iOS 27.

What can the new Siri AI do?

There is Siri, the virtual voice assistant that everyone has mocked for 10-plus years. That will continue to live on older phones and devices. But now, starting with Apple’s 27 operating systems, there’s a new, advanced Siri AI. The naming is important because Siri AI will have advanced capabilities and be much more responsive.

The new Siri AI will be able to handle more natural commands, understand your personal info, and communicate more fluidly. On one level, that means asking it what time you’re supposed to meet with Bob tonight will produce a real answer because it knows who Bob is, and it knows to look in your email or text message conversations with him to get the time.

But even deeper, on an iPhone, you can tell Siri AI to take the concert dates you’re looking at on screen and add them to your calendar. Or you could ask it to copy the link in an Instagram description and remind you to check it out later, after your last meeting.

Even though not all of these capabilities of Siri AI on an iPhone will transfer to a home speaker, the assistant still needs to be smart and useful in general. Based on early testing, I think Apple has done that. Siri AI has been fully rebuilt from the ground up, and it shows.

Siri AI on a HomePod

After spending time with Gemini on Google’s Home Speaker and Alexa+ on Echo speakers, I can’t wait for a new HomePod with Siri AI. 

We used to live in a world where you had to speak in specific phrases, one at a time. “Hey Siri, turn on the kitchen lights.” “Hey Siri, open the kitchen blinds to 50%.” And so on with a trigger word for each. It’s getting tiring to talk like that as new assistants have upped their game. 

My muscle memory is evolving to ask for the lights, blinds, and other things all in one breath.

There are already some tricks you can do with a HomePod to make Siri seem smart. I hope that once Siri AI comes to Apple’s home speakers, it will actually be more capable. 

At Apple’s WWDC, it announced Describe a Shortcut and Describe an Extension. These two things use Apple Intelligence to take complicated multi-step programming tasks and simplify them into natural language commands. These are the kinds of things I’m hoping HomePods will be able to do in the near future.

Here’s an example. Maybe you have a bad habit of looking at emails that came in overnight when you first wake up at 6 AM. But because you’re still sleepy, you often forget to go back to them later in the day. With Describe a Shortcut, you could create a reminder that’s triggered when you open the Gmail app before 7 AM. “Hey Siri, if I open Gmail before 7 AM, then remind me at 11 AM to respond to emails.”

Applied to a HomePod, you could do things like, “Hey Siri, once this 5-minute pasta timer goes off, set another timer for 8 minutes and label it ‘sauce.’”

There have been rumors of not only a new HomePod speaker, but also a new Home Hub with a screen. Maybe we’ll get multiple new home speakers from Apple in the near future. As long as it comes with Siri AI as the assistant, then I’ll be excited.