HomeKit with AI in iOS 27

Apple released iOS 27 on September 14th and, as every year, it’s time to check out what’s changed in the Home app and the HomeKit standard, though I’m afraid we don’t have much new this time around… This year, the word that sums up the new features is artificial intelligence, since it seems they want to solve everything with AI… But let’s see what use this is to those of us who already have our devices set up and our automations more or less stable.

Let’s go through the new features, starting with the cameras, which took up most of the time during the presentation:

Cameras

There are changes to HomeKit Secure Video, which had been the most neglected part for quite a while:

• 4K recording. No more 1080p cap. If your camera supports it, it now records and streams up to 4K without taking up iCloud storage, you know how it goes.
• AI summaries. Instead of just showing «motion detected», the app now tells you what actually happened: a person, an animal, a vehicle, a package… it describes it in words, more or less like those summaries it already did with messages.
• Facial recognition. This could be interesting depending on the language and region… it cross-references faces with your Photos library, so the alert comes with a full name. «Carlos Sahuquillo is at the door.»
• Cross-camera event grouping. If someone walks past one camera and then past another, the app understands it’s the same event and doesn’t bombard you with separate alerts.
• Quick preview. You hold down the video notification and it plays a clip without opening anything.

Notifications and search: less noise, more context

This goes hand in hand with the above and is, for me, one of the most useful things day to day:

• Smart notifications. The app bundles related alerts into a single one that updates in real time. The classic «arrives home» + «opens the door» now comes through as a single, sensible notification, not as three separate ones piling up on your phone or watch screen.
• Natural language search. You can search through recordings by typing natural-language queries like «What time did Carlos come in?», and not just within the Home app — also from Spotlight.

Energy in the Home app

The Home app now includes an Energy section to check the power usage and consumption of compatible accessories. In my case, here’s what the new tab and a plug’s detail view look like:

For those of us running Home Assistant

In Home Assistant, this part is much more developed: I can check daily and monthly consumption, compare periods and view graphs from the energy dashboard.

Look, if you’ve got Home Assistant set up at home, don’t let yourself be dazzled by the camera updates in HomeKit. There are a few more core features worth noting in HomeKit:

• Thread 1.4. They’ve finally gotten their act together on the standard, which had been stuck at 1.2 for a year now.
• Faster pairing and simplified Matter setup. Adding a Matter accessory is now quicker; before it was basically a lottery… sometimes it paired fine, other times it didn’t and you had to restart a controller, and some devices just wouldn’t cooperate so you had to restart the device too… all without a readable log, of course.
• Energy management. The Home app is starting to show plug and meter consumption in its own tab; in Home Assistant we already have much more complete dashboards, graphs and history.
• Remote Apple TV updates straight from the Home app, though I’ll tell you this hasn’t worked for me yet… my HomePods updated from the Home app but not the Apple TV.

A note on compatibility: Apple Intelligence features depend on your iPhone model, language, and region. Also, cameras need to be compatible with HomeKit Secure Video and require a compatible accessory hub plus iCloud+ to store recordings. It’s worth checking these requirements before updating.

The usual «but»

Before you rush to update expecting magic and a heaven-and-earth kind of change, watch out for the minimum requirements, because Apple has raised the bar with AI and some devices get left out:

• The AI features (summaries, recognition, natural search) require an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, so they only work on an iPhone 15 Pro or later. If you’ve got an iPhone 13 Pro Max like Jacobo Vidal from the Desde el Reloj podcast, you’re missing out on the best bits… maybe this is one more reason to upgrade, Jacobo, that Duo has your name on it.
• You need an updated accessory hub: an Apple TV with tvOS 27 or a HomePod with software 27, so if your Apple TV can’t be updated, you’re also screwed…
• And camera video still depends on iCloud+ services, so if you don’t pay for iCloud… maybe now’s the time to reconsider, though I don’t know who doesn’t pay for iCloud these days, especially not you folks who follow this podcast or the blog.

My take

So, in short, iOS 27 is a solid step forward if you live within the Apple ecosystem and have HomeKit cameras and more or less modern hardware at home. The whole natural-language and unified-notifications side of things could be really interesting.

That said, for anyone who’s already got a Home Assistant setup, most of these new features (energy, context-aware alerts, search that integrates with whatever you want) is something we already had — not exactly a game-changer or however you want to put it… What I do like is the upgrade to Thread 1.4 and the easier Matter pairing: that genuinely benefits everyone, no matter how your home setup looks.

The rest… well, as is almost always the case with Apple, it’s a very polished experience, a nice-looking app, all very user-friendly so you don’t have to think about the tech running underneath… in exchange for owning a modern iPhone and staying locked into the ecosystem. For now, that trade-off still works for me, but it’s not giving me enough reasons to ditch Home Assistant or Controller for HomeKit, so for another year we’ll keep running a mixed ecosystem that, so far, is working well for me. I’ll keep testing it these next few days on my own setup and let you know on the podcast how it’s really performing, beyond the press release.