The case of the haunted HomePod

Well, that was spooky. Being a lazy sort of person I have a habit of asking my Apple HomePod to play my favourite tunes. This used to work well, with the device duly serving up a bunch of what my sister used to call “middle of the road cr*p”. However, lately it seems that the HomePod has decided that my tastes have changed to jangly guitar rock and obscure Japanese bands. Most strange. At first I thought it was Apple’s algorithms deciding it might be fun to test the limits of my taste, but today I resolved to try and find out why the HomePod thought my tastes had changed to much.

The answer is kind of interesting. The latest release of the HomePod software has the ability to recognise the voices of family members. But you have to enable this. And if you don’t enable this recognition the HomePod uses a default account for the person doing the talking. And for some reason it had fixed on number one son’s account. It must have picked up his presence on the network a while back and decided that his was the voice of power. So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been living with his tastes.

I just had to set my account as the default user and enable voice recognition and I’m back in a world of Steely Dan and the like.