A third-party HomeKit app now lets you describe what you want your home to do, and handles the fiddly setup automatically.
Controller for HomeKit shipped an update adding natural language automation creation. Describe a desired behavior in plain text — "dim the living room at sunset when the TV turns on" — and the AI generates the corresponding HomeKit scene, workflow, or automation. The developer is marketing it with the phrase "just say it."
Apple's own HomeKit automation builder has long been the platform's weak spot. Multi-condition automations require tapping through nested menus and manually setting conditional logic that most users abandon after the first attempt. A third-party app filling that gap with an AI layer is exactly the kind of work the App Store ecosystem does well — though it also raises the question of whether Apple ships something similar natively and quietly makes this feature redundant.
For now, the people most likely to benefit are the ones who bought a handful of smart bulbs, attempted to build an automation twice, and settled for a basic timer. Which is most HomeKit users.