HomePod chaos

Hi,

Recently I bought 2 HomePod minis and placed them in my kitchen and bathroom. I have noticed that they keep their alarms/reminders device-local and take priority over any other device.

For example I can hold up my phone, say something like "hey siri set alarm for 7am" and the kitchen echo will respond something like "none of your devices can do that" (obviously sound quality suffered from distance) or worse, it sets an alarm on the device not my phone, waking everyone in the household not just me.

Another annoying habit it has is to set a reminder on one device, then later I say something like "cancel my reminders", accidentally the other HomePod picks it up, says something like "I cancelled all your reminders" then a few minutes later the first HomePod will still remind me - so it's not even shared across HomePods.

Setting wake-up alarms gotten so bad and complicated (walk out of a room, whisper to the phone directly) I had to disable both HomePods from listening to "siri". Now all they are is expensive decoration (except when once a week we listen to some music on it).

Is there no way to make HomePods not to be the highest priority devices and use alarms/reminders from the phone (like it does with shopping lists)? This annoying experience I would expect from MS and Alexa maybe, but not Apple.

HomePod chaos
 
 
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