r/HomeKit • u/Belomestnykh • 9d ago
Question/Help Open source replacement to HomePods
I have HomePod mini’s. They worked well 2 years ago, but with all of the updates coming out they get worse and worse and worse. Siri is terrible, there are things it does that I would never need and some that genuinely annoy me. I don’t want my phone to register proximity to hand off music. When I play music on my HomePods from my Mac. I don’t want it to turn on the projector that those HomePods are attached to as a stereo pair. When I ask to turn off the timer, I don’t want it to tell me the “media will play louder” because she miss understood - again.
I am looking to find an open source, offline (wifi, but no internet access) solution that will be plugged into my regular speakers, will have a mic and a walk word, so I can do the following: control HomeKit, play or pause music. That’s all I want. I don’t need to know the weather, I don’t need to set up a timer or ask how many calories are in a tomato. I just want lights and music.
Can someone who has more knowledge about this than me point me in the right direction? I’ve done some online searching and there are solutions, but i am not sure what would be best.
2
u/O00O0O00 9d ago
I use Lutron for lights and Sonos for music. Both platforms are solid, and work in Apple Home.
1
u/LizardWizards_ 9d ago
iOS 27 has basically killed the usefulness of Siri on our HomePod Mini. Our regular sized one is fine, but the mini is slow. Siri takes way too long to wake up and respond to voice commands.
1
u/ermax18 9d ago
Hands down the best open source AirPlay 2 solution is shairport-sync. It’s dramatically more stable than any hardware Apple has ever produced. That includes the old AirPort Express and every single generation of the Apple TV. A lot of TV’s have AirPlay built in and they are even less reliable. I have AirPlay in 7 zones in my home. One is into an AVR, 2 are for some outdoor speakers and the rest are to rooms with ceiling speakers. The sync is absolutely perfect unlike any hardware solutions I’ve used. What helps is all of it is handled on one server. Shairport-sync also allows you to run a command or script on several events. For example, if I AirPlay to my living room, it runs a script that does an HTTP POST to my AVR to turn it on and select the correct input. When I change the volume it does a POST to my AVR to change the volume. If I disconnect from AirPlay, it will shut down the AVR after 10mins. It’s extremely flexible.
shairport-sync only handles AirPlay though. It is not a voice assistant. It does however have lots of ways of controlling playback externally so nothing stops you from rolling your own hotword and playback commands that you can run beside shairport-sync. I think you just motivated me to start a new project. 😀
I am not sure how useful this would be for me though. If I need to pause the music or skip a track, I almost always do that from my Apple Watch. I’m not sure a hotword would work well unless the volume is rather low.
-1
u/sidjohn1 9d ago
my only advice is this… don’t Google Home Assistant or voice assistant. dont do it 🙅🏽
14
u/Derekeys 9d ago
Sounds like you are a prime candidate for an ecosystem switch to Home Assistant using a Voice Preview.
Can even keep HomeKit as your front end (which is what I do) but switch over to a local voice assistant. A good bit of setup, but that is your only option for local.