Siri's AI Found My Swedish Aunt’s Marinade Recipe In a Years-Old Message — That’s When I Decided AI, and Apple's New HomeView, May Well Earn Its Spot in the Home
I was at the New York launch of Apple’s first smart display. After months of living with Siri AI on my iPhone, I think it hints at a more meaningful role for AI in our homes — though not without some questions
The best thing artificial intelligence has done for me this year has nothing to do with work. Instead, it was when Apple’s Siri AI found a marinade recipe from my Swedish aunt, buried in a message my mum sent me in 2023. What used to take me at least 15 minutes to dig out every time I threw a dinner party took under 30 seconds (and it’s now saved in my notes).
That example sprang to mind as I stood in a beautifully decorated Manhattan apartment last week, watching Apple unveil its first smart display, HomeView. It has a compact square screen perched on a rounded speaker, will cost £299 when it arrives on 13 November, and it is Apple’s long-overdue answer to the Amazon Echo Show and the Google Nest Hub, both of which have sat on kitchen worktops for years.
But HomeView isn’t just another smart display. For me, it marks the point where AI could stop being an assistant we bark commands at — turn off the lights, set a timer, tell me when Einstein was born — and start being a helpful part of the smart home.
Apple's HomeView launches officially on November 13th, but can be preordered from Apple and stores like John Lewis now.
It's a serious new launch for Apple, that tech journalists descended on New York to preview.
Before I get into the AI part, though, HomeView’s design deserves a brief mention, if only because it might be a smart display you won’t want to hide behind the tea and coffee pots in a modern kitchen. Rival displays often look like tablets propped on speaker cushions, but HomeView places its square screen above a soft-shouldered aluminium base, with no logo or buttons in sight, giving it a more premium look — anyone who remembers Apple’s sunflower-like iMac G4 will spot the family resemblance.
HomeView is also available in Silver, Starlight, Rose Pink and Space Grey, with a color-coordinated cable, so there won’t be a stark white flex snaking across an oak worktop — though it needs to stay plugged in, so you will need to plan its position around a socket.
You can also customize the clock faces to suit your décor, with plenty of colors and fonts available, and at night, the screen dims to 0.3 nits and switches to night mode so it doesn’t disturb you if it’s in the bedroom. A wall-mounted model is also available, but concealing its wiring will require even more planning than finding a plug socket in the kitchen.
The design is reminiscent of retro Apple Macs, with a modern Apple aesthetic.
Beyond the design, HomeView has Siri AI at its heart. This is Apple’s redesigned, more personalized, contextually aware assistant, capable of answering follow-up questions and accessing calendars, emails, and messages to deliver helpful information. I’ve been using Siri AI on my iPhone since June (its revamped AI system launched to the public in September), but a few of its best moments would have been even more useful on HomeView.
Take that marinade recipe I mentioned. I couldn’t remember when I was sent it or how. I asked Siri to “find the BBQ marinade recipe I was sent by mum”, and it found a photo of the recipe (all in Swedish) in a message thread from 2023. A second prompt pulled the ingredients into a note and translated them.
It did the same with my uncle’s pasta bake (my family has some great recipes), which my mum emailed me in 2021. For this, it pulled up the recipe, added the ingredients to a shopping list after a prompt, and showed me the method on my iPhone. Siri has also successfully added multiple school dates to our family calendar from a school email (a game-changer) and found out what time my son’s sports club finished, also from my emails.
It's a device that feels perfectly suited to sitting on a kitchen counter.
Now, AI is already in many homes, of course, with each taking a slightly different approach. Amazon’s Alexa+ can book restaurant reservations and order shopping in some regions, as well as create smart home routines that you can build entirely with your voice. You can also feed Alexa information so it knows certain things and can give you more personalized responses. Echo Show screens come with adverts, however, and Alexa+ will cost £19.99 a month once UK early access ends.
Google’s Gemini for Home, now on Nest Hubs, lets you ask multiple questions, interrupt it or change your mind mid-request, and uses Voice Match to bring up each person’s calendar and reminders. Its best features, which come in the form of Gemini Live, sit behind a Google Home Premium subscription, though, and it doesn’t dig into your messages and emails in the way Siri AI does.
Meanwhile, Siri AI won’t book you a table, but because it lives on the phone where your messages, emails, and notes already sit, it’s better than others at answering questions about your specific world. HomeView brings that to the kitchen, recognizing up to six household members by face and showing each their own calendar, messages and reminders (assuming you are an Apple user and use apps like Apple Calendar, Mail and Messages). That, coupled with its cooking mode with swipeable steps and built-in timers, means I can picture my aunt’s marinade on its screen, found by voice, while my hands are covered in garlic and five-spice.
The HomeView does have a wire, so you'll need to locate it close to a power source.
That’s not to say this kind of future has no drawbacks; some tensions have already surfaced in reactions to Apple’s HomeView launch film. The three-minute ad drops you into a family of five’s morning scramble, complete with missing keys, a row over the heating and a quick French toast recipe, and it split opinion online.
Some found it chaotic, which it is. Others said it mirrored their own households (I can relate here too, as a parent of two young children). There’s also the question of adding yet another screen to your home, though the flip side of that is the potential to bring a household together on one shared screen rather than everyone sitting on individual devices. Meanwhile, the ending also raised privacy questions: the family crowds around the display to watch a camera feed of their daughter leaving with her boyfriend, which is admittedly awkward to watch, even though current smart displays can do it regardless.
Other sites also noted that the kitchen island in the advert had a cut-out solely to feed the HomeView power cable through, which is a different problem altogether. If AI devices become the heart of the home, we may need to design our homes around them — I already very much regret the decision not to include power in my kitchen island nine years ago.
I’m also aware that to find the marinade I keep raving about, Siri had to read my messages and know who “mum” is. Combine that with always-listening microphones and a camera that can recognize faces (as in the case of HomeView), and you’re being asked to place a great deal of trust in a device that lives beside the kettle in a room where children do homework and guests gather.
Apple says it processes camera data on the device, where even Apple can’t access it, and that it doesn’t store Siri requests. Its privacy record is also stronger than most, and you can switch off both the camera and microphone in the settings. But HomeView lacks a physical slider to block the lens or cut the mics, as Amazon and Google offer, and many families might miss that reassurance.
While it might not be 'portable' as in wireless, it's still a size where it's easy to move as you require it.
Still, I think HomeView points to something exciting with its ability to deliver more personalized and contextualized responses. The smart home of the past decade was about control: turning lights on, adjusting the heating, asking for the weather. The next decade, I hope, will be about memory and understanding – a home that knows who is in the room, what they need, and where that recipe from 2023 ended up.
If AI can help keep a family’s recipes, routines and useful little bits of information within reach, it will earn its place in my home far more than any assistant that simply sets a timer.
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