I hope this leads to some way besides Airplay to play arbitrary audio with no delay. If Apple had just included support for Bluetooth audio (or God forbid, an aux jack) I would've bought two full-sized Homepods to use as computer speakers two months ago.

What's the trouble with buying any of the competition, if you want those features?

You can get a Klipsch R51 PM for quite a bit less than the price of two HomePods. Better audio, Bluetooth, aux, optical, USB, even phono pre-amp in case you have a turntable.

tambourine_man

They do sound incredible. Though I don’t think I’ll ever own a voice assistant.

lukifer

I keep Siri disabled on mine, and I use a Raspberry Pi for cloudless voice control. They’re pricy for dumb speakers, but worth it IMO.

prdonahue

How are you using your Raspberry Pi to control your HomePod?

lukifer

It's a convoluted setup I'm not sure I'd recommend to anyone else! :) Still tinkering on it, but current rig is a Respeaker Core [0] running voice2json [1], which sends MQTT commands to a Mac Mini running mopidy [2], and the audio is routed through Airfoil [3] to multiple AirPlay speakers. (In theory, a Pi could drive all that directly, using shairport [4] rather than Airfoil.)

The major shortcoming is that Airfoil doesn't support Airplay 2, so it doesn't take full advantage of HomePod stereo pairing; and while the sync is perfect, it comes at the cost of massive lag (5+ seconds). Sounds great though!

[0] https://respeaker.io/rk3229_core/

[1] https://voice2json.org/

[2] https://mopidy.com/

[3] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

[4] https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync