As spotted by Ryan Christoffel at MacStories, Apple has quietly announced limited SiriKit support on the upcoming HomePod:
With the intelligence of Siri, users control HomePod through natural voice interaction and can conveniently access iOS apps that support SiriKit Messaging, Lists, and Notes. Siri recognizes SiriKit requests made on HomePod and sends those requests to the user’s iOS device for processing. To prepare your app, make sure that your SiriKit integration is up to date and that you’ve adopted all of the appropriate intents.
This means that the HomePod is more or less a remote speaker for Siri on the iPhone to interact with apps like OmniFocus, Todoist, Evernote or Telegram.
This is different than the handful of Siri tasks the HomePod can handle itself, which includes Homekit support, timers, alarms and more.
While I’m glad to see some progress here, I think that it is time Siri become much more cloud-centric. Alexa and Google Assistant can do the same set of tasks across devices, while Siri still remains very device-centric. Apple has its reasons for this, but its approach could lead to a less-than-ideal user experience.
If your iPhone is off or isn’t connected to the HomePod, setting up a reminder in Todoist via the HomePod won’t work. If Siri’s history plays out here, the first or second time that happens, many users will just give up.