New feature to group HomePods and AirPlay 2 speakers
As found by 9to5Mac, code from the first beta of iOS 16.1, which was released last week to developers, includes references to a new way to create a group of speakers in the Home app. At this point, details about how the new feature will work are unclear, but some of the strings seen by 9to5Mac give us an idea of how it will work.
Currently, you can group two or more HomePods or supported AirPlay 2 speakers together by choosing them in the AirPlay menu. However, this group of speakers is temporary, which means that eventually you’ll have to select all speakers again if you want to play something using multi-room audio.
With this update, users should be able to create a permanent speaker group in the Home app, making this process much simpler. One of the messages hidden in the beta’s code shows that the speaker group can be set as the default audio output of an Apple TV.
An interesting detail is that the code makes it clear that all speakers within a group must use the same Siri language, otherwise they can’t be paired together. The system will prompt the user to automatically set all speakers to the same Siri language in order to proceed with group pairing.