The short answer is yes, I’ve done everything I can today and I’m still disappointed in the result. No amount of fudging naming conventions in HomeKit will address basic voice usability issues that are caused by the fact that the LED bar is a “light” to both matter and HomeKit.
Yes, the LED bar changes the Siri interaction a bit and causes something like “Are all the office lights on?” to now include the LED bar state in the response. I’ve never asked Siri that question in 4+ years, so I personally hadn’t noticed any difference in how I use these. Have you identified any other status request responses that are now off? I tend to control my home using commands to toggle individual accessory states or to trigger scenes.
I have four switches in my kitchen. If you have a way to reliably set them all to an arbitrary brightness with your voice without also controlling the LED bar, please let me know your solution.
I don’t know of a way to set the brightness with my voice without controlling the LED bar. What exactly bothers you about this? I mean, I personally can’t wait until we’re given a way to disable the LED bar when the load is off, but I’ll patiently wait for that day to come.
Examples of things I would be able to do with no effort on my part that are now unworkable because of the LED bar are:
- “Turn on/off all the main floor lights” (workaround one or more scenes for this and train my family to only use the scene wording)
Why isn’t this working for you? It’s working fine for me. Yes, the LED brightness ramps up when the lights go on, but that’s how Inovelli intended for them to work. Are you using Zones correctly? If so, you shouldn’t need to use Scenes to have that command work. I’m confused why you’re putting the blame on the LED bar.
- “Hey siri, are the main floor lights on?” (No workaround - the answer will always be “some of the lights are off”)
This is partially correct. Yes, since the LED bar is a light, it will read the state of that back to you.
a. If the Inovelli switch is the only light accessory in a room & you ask for the light status of that room, Siri will reply, “The Office Switch is on & the Office LED Bar is off”. This assumes you named the accessories that way.
b. If you have a switch as part of a larger zone with other light accessories and ask what the status is of that zone (what I’m assuming you’re doing with “main floor”), it will pull in the Room name before the Accessory name & generalize the response. I’m getting this, “The Office Office Switch is on & the rest are off”.
c. If you have more than one light category in the room and ask for the status of the lights, it will say, “The Office Switch is on & two of your lights are off”. One of those is clearly the LED bar, so it’s a little confusing, but it’s not the end of the world. The CSA & Apple will eventually fix this.
- Just using the word “light”, or “switch”. Siri/homekit is so random with how that’s interpreted that we need to make stuff up like “Dimmer” and “bar”
I’m not sure why this isn’t working for you, or why you see this as a problem with the White Series. You didn’t answer my question earlier about how you’re naming your devices or comment on whether or not you’re using the room name in your command. The reality is that we should be using UIDs for every “accessory” that is attached to a single device. Many folks forget to do this, or don’t realize the importance of this. So with these White Switches, we have three accessories, not just one. We have the switch, the LED bar, and the config button.
Additionally, Siri works based on how you build it out. I don’t think you realize that long before these White Series came around, when you add a separate & second light accessory to the same room, out goes the ability to use the shorter “…turn on/off the light” command.
I just renamed the switch accessory (i.e. not the LED bar or the config accessory) in one of mine from Office Downlight to Office Switch & when I said, “Hey Siri, turn on the Office Switch”, it worked fine. FYA, I have a smart bulb in a lamp on my desk as well and that did not turn on.
This will get even worse when the rest of the white series rolls out. According to my understanding, now my fan control AND my basic on/off switches will also have exposed status light endpoints that only add frustration to my setup and usage experience.
I wholeheartedly agree that expectations - reality = frustrations. I’m frustrated.
The reality is that Inovelli came up with a clever feature (LED light bars) that can’t be accurately represented in the spec. There’s nothing in the spec that allows for matter to differentiate between a status light and a load light. This actually starts to get even worse if you try to use the functionality the way it was intended. If I do set up an automation to turn on a LED bar when the garage door opens, then all that other functionality continues to be broken (“are there any lights on”, “turn off all the lights”, etc).
My expectation was that I would be able to add this matter based switch to HomeKit and have it “just work”. The reality is that I’ve now spent hours fiddling to workaround and attempt to disable functionality that I don’t want or need. Everything about this switch “just works” except that it has an extra light attached to it.
If you really step back and examine it, I think you could argue that the only reason I’m not using the software in the best way is because these Inovelli switches are not using the matter spec consistently with the design intent. It’s clever, but it’s a solution for power users.
Are you saying that you’d prefer for Inovelli to have not released a product that’s future-proofed and instead gone without an LED bar with their first Matter over Thread release? If so, considering the price of these things, that they require electrical rework, and that most folks who implement smart switches, a) aren’t wanting to replace them every few years, and, b) tend to deploy quite a few across their home at once, I’m definitely glad they went this route even if it means we have some growing pains. I don’t mind that the LED bars are connected to the load & I like knowing that I can halfway use the status lights for now (even if the process isn’t perfect). I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the CSA finds a fix for this, be it a “Status Light” or something else. Then we’ll of course have to wait for Apple to adopt that new spec.
The very best solution would be for the matter spec to roll out some sort of “status light” functionality. Until then, for non-power users, the best user experience would be for the white series light to have a way to disable the addressability of the status light in firmware.
I hadn’t gotten around to messing with using the status bars in automations as I’m still working through warranty swaps, but I did do a quick test and I see what you’re referring to. If I have an LED bar turn a certain color to indicate that a lock or door was left unlocked/open, I don’t want that status to reset when I tell Siri to turn off all the lights in a room or zone. This is a real problem.