How to Use HomePod Mini Physical Controls

Did you get a HomePod or the HomePod Mini recently? If you’re new to the smart speaker, you may be wondering how to handle basic operations of the devices, including using the physical controls on the device. We’re here to help you get started with using the controls on HomePod and HomePod Mini.

Both HomePod and HomePod Mini are powered by Siri, which you may already be familiar with. A lot of you may already know many of the voice commands that you need to use to get certain tasks done. However, the physical controls on the HomePod are important too, even if you wouldn’t be using them a lot. These controls can be used to not only adjust the volume but also activate Siri and even control the music playback on the device, and if you happen to turn off Siri listening on HomePod, you’ll need to use the physical controls too to activate Siri on the devices.

HomePods physical controls apart from the capacitive volume buttons can be considered as gestures. Let’s take a look at how you can make use of the physical controls on your new HomePod.

Using HomePod Physical Controls to Adjust Volume, Siri, Music, Alarms, Phone

Regardless of whether you own the bigger, more expensive HomePod or the cheaper HomePod Mini, they both come with a capacitive top surface comprising of two capacitive “+” and “-” buttons for volume control. Here’s everything that you can do with them.

Volume Control

Volume Up: To increase the volume by one level, you can tap on the “+” button. However, if you want to raise it to the maximum level, you can press and hold the “+” button instead.

Volume Down: Similar to the Volume Up function, tap on the “-” button to reduce the volume by one level or press and hold the button to lower the volume by multiple levels.

Siri

You can activate Siri without using the voice command “Hey Siri”. All you need to do is simply press and hold the top surface of your HomePod until it lights up and then proceed to ask your questions. It’s that easy.

Music Playback

You’ll be making use of gestures on the capacitive surface to control music playback. Let’s take a look at all the controls:

Pause/Resume: When music is being played back, tapping the top surface of your HomePod will immediately pause the playback. You can tap on it again to resume the playback. Even if you tap your HomePod after it’s been idle for a while, it will resume playing the song that you last listened to.

Play Next Track: To skip the current song and play the next song, simply double-tap the top surface of the HomePod, preferably between the two volume buttons.

Replay Previous Track: To go back to the song that you just finished listening to, you can just triple-tap the top surface of the HomePod. This will stop the playback of the current song and replay the previous track, as long as you’re listening to a song from a playlist or an album.

Alarms

A lot of users make use of their HomePod to set an alarm. When an alarm is triggered on the HomePod, you can silence it by simply tapping the top surface of the device.

Phone Calls

During an active phone call on your HomePod, the top-surface lights up in green. If you tap once on the surface, HomePod will end the call.

You can also switch phone calls using HomePod’s physical gestures. When you’re using your HomePod as a speakerphone and you’re getting a second incoming call, you can press and hold a finger on the capacitive surface to hold the current call and connect to the new call. You can switch between both the calls by just double-tapping the surface.

As you can probably see, the gestures aren’t complicated by any means. Most of the gestures just involve tapping or holding the capacitive surface, but it all depends on what your HomePod is currently doing.

Apart from all these gestures, if you’re one of the people who use VoiceOver, which is a feature that can be enabled from the Accessibility settings on your iPhone, you can double-tap on the surface to activate it. It’s important to note that when this feature is enabled, every other gesture will require one extra tap. For instance, silencing an alarm will require a double-tap instead of a single tap.

Hopefully, you were able to get a hang of all the HomePod’s physical controls and gestures fairly quickly. How often do you use the capacitive surface on your HomePod over voice commands? Share your personal experiences and make sure to drop your valuable feedback in the comments section down below.