This is the forum archive of Homey. For more information about Homey, visit the Official Homey website.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
From the newsletter
Mathijs
Member
"For example, a Spotify Connect speaker can be paired, and playback can be controlled with the Homey Smartphone App. Using a Flow, playing specific songs, playlists or artists can be automated. But searching and managing your playlists from within our app on the go will be removed – we think the service’s own app will always be a better experience for this."
Yeah but wait a moment, with my Google Home Mini I can ask it to play the latest album from David Byrne and will play that from Spotify. I can ask it to play let's Dance by Bowie and it will find the song and play it. I can handle volume, pause, skip, rewind etc.
Using Homey I will have to make flows and have to know in advance what music I want to hear in a few weeks.
And as Homey is dropping Voice and aims towards Google Home (and Alexa) for that they expect people to have that hardware (using the build-in microphones is just not a usable option), it is very hard to see what a Homey user would do with the Music app. If I want to start a playlist I just ask Alexa or Google Home directly. If I want to hear a song I did not pre-program I can't use Homey.
in short, a Google Home Mini for 30 euro (and often free) is better in any way for music and Athom tells us it will stay that way. So while dropping Voice, they might as well drop Music as it has little to do with what Athom claims is there forte, automation.
A lot of promises are broken in today's newsletter. Not cool, not cool at all. And still they advertise with talking to your Homey. Not cool.
Yeah but wait a moment, with my Google Home Mini I can ask it to play the latest album from David Byrne and will play that from Spotify. I can ask it to play let's Dance by Bowie and it will find the song and play it. I can handle volume, pause, skip, rewind etc.
Using Homey I will have to make flows and have to know in advance what music I want to hear in a few weeks.
And as Homey is dropping Voice and aims towards Google Home (and Alexa) for that they expect people to have that hardware (using the build-in microphones is just not a usable option), it is very hard to see what a Homey user would do with the Music app. If I want to start a playlist I just ask Alexa or Google Home directly. If I want to hear a song I did not pre-program I can't use Homey.
in short, a Google Home Mini for 30 euro (and often free) is better in any way for music and Athom tells us it will stay that way. So while dropping Voice, they might as well drop Music as it has little to do with what Athom claims is there forte, automation.
A lot of promises are broken in today's newsletter. Not cool, not cool at all. And still they advertise with talking to your Homey. Not cool.
Comments
it will still be available in the state it is in know,
it will just not be improved anymore,
as it is just too difficult to improve, especially when you compare to the "competition"
for the music, did you even read the full newsletter?
they will remove the playlists, so playlists itself will not be a thing anymore inside homey.
and for automation you can start any playlist that is already pre-programmed on/for your device, you just can't make the playlists in homey anymore (who does that anyway?), but make playlists for example in spotify, and then that playlist you can start, want another playlist? then you can just say/type/press button/start on motion to do so, try to do that with google/alexa, where you can only say it to change.
Homeys (and other smart hubs) real claim to fame is the flow systems og rule machines, these are needed by the "talk to"-systems for anything more complex than turn on / turn off. Not even the hue platform has a easy to use timeline light animation app or ui for creating scripted light scenes / transitions (it blows my mind, that I can't first dim my ceiling light then one by one fade surrounding lights for that cinematic fancyness when it's movietime, without some API scripting or similar. :-) ),
Having used homey mostly for home testing and tinkering, I think todays move of dropping voice and the music part to focus on controlling rather than management, is both expected, clever and about time. The music manager/app always seems out of place and sub-par UI-wise compared to do the management in the streaming app. Even the official sonos app has had this issue for years. it just feels like the wrong place to do the management (sonos is getting much better though). It will also free some hardware resources on the homey for better things. :-)
If you want to be on par with google and the like, it will drain you completely of your resources and fast. And it will not give the customers a better experience, no notable advantages. It's just when the environment changes (tech giants making there appearances on the voice recognition field, for what ever reasons they have), you have to adapt. I get that.
So focus on integrating voice input devices in homey: yes. Focus on making your own voice recognition dataset: no.