Apple HomeView

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music and making FaceTime calls to home monitoring and hands-free automations with voice control — all designed with privacy and security at the core. HomeView recognizes users by their faces, adapting so they can access their personal content in Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Reminders, and Find My. HomeView features Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that’s profoundly more capable and conversational, with broad world knowledge that powers richer music discovery and onscreen awareness. When paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled device, it can also draw on a user’s personal context, such as their Calendar, Messages, and relevant information across their apps, to provide more helpful, personalized responses.

Your first question might be how this facial recognition to identify users works, using a Center Stage camera alone, when other products (like, notably, the iPhone Duo) don’t let you unlock using the camera alone. HomeView does not have FaceID. I asked about this and Apple reps said that first, your home is (reasonably!) presumed to be a safe space. But in order for users to be recognized — by voice or face — they must have a “registered personal device” that supports Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, that device must be present on the home’s Wi-Fi network, and it must have been recently unlocked. Per footnote 2 on the Newsroom post:

Personal context requests require a paired Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad running the latest software version with Siri AI turned on and set to a supported language.

So, alas, an Apple Watch does not count as a personal device. Effectively, your iPhone or iPad serves as a second factor to securely identify you. FaceID serves as a single factor for authentication, so something like iPhone Duo cannot do what HomeView is doing here.

★ Tuesday, 13 October 2026