The Siri assistant on Apple’s HomePod and HomePod mini speakers is currently exhibiting issues giving the current time, day and date.
I asked Siri on my HomePod yesterday to tell me the current time. I uttered the usual “Siri, what’s the time?” phrase but was confronted with this: “I found some web results. I can show them if you ask again from your iPhone.” The assistant gave me the same answer when I asked for the current day and date.
It appears that something broke because Siri has always been able to answer such questions. That kind of answer is typical when the response is too long to read or for queries unsupported by the Siri speaker.
Siri for HomePod is having issues relaying the time
These issues persisted into the following day and are still present as I write this. This has annoyed the hell out of me, and I noticed today that Siri responds correctly if I include location in my query.
I checked location permission for the Home app, but no dice. I double-checked my HomePod settings in the Home app, but nothing has changed.
I just want Siri on HomePod to relay the current time without using my iPhone. If I’m interested in the current time in another city, I’ll include a custom location in my query. If not, just assume I want to know the time of my current location.
That’s how asking queries about the current time, day and date have always worked!
Apple’s System Status page doesn’t reveal any issues with Apple’s cloud-based services, but a quick check of social media posts reveals I’m not alone in this.
How can you fix this?
There’s no fix for this (not that I know of) as of this writing, but you can bet Apple will respond to the situation now that the Apple blogs reported it.
Meanwhile, include your location in the query. Instead of saying, “Siri, what’s the time?” I asked Siri what the time was in Zagreb, where I live.
The assistant gave me the current time (but included “Zagreb” in its response). It’s unclear if this is a stupid bug, a machine learning error or something as mundane as a misconfigured setting on Apple’s end. It could be an AI issue.
In 2017, complaints cropped up about the iPhone’s autocorrect feature replacing “i” with the uppercase letter “A” and a question mark symbol. That was a machine learning issue, and Apple fixed it.