Apple seeds HomePod minis to testers in Sweden ahead of official release

Homepod Mini Review (Image credit: Stephen Warwick / iMore)

What you need to know

Apple is testing HomePod mini in Sweden.
HomePod mini's Siri can't currently speak Swedish.

Apple has seeded some Swedish testers with HomePod mini units, a smart speaker that has so far not officially been released in the country.

According to a report by the Swedish-language website Teknivecka, Apple has given some beta testers a HomePod mini on which to test Siri in their native language. HomePods don't currently support Swedish Siri, except on these test devices.

According to the report, Apple is using a third party to seed the units to testers.

Via machine translation:

Macradion has received several tips on people who are testing HomePod mini in Swedish at the time of writing. It all happens so that an external party that is not Apple sends out a HomePod mini to selected testers who will then integrate with Siri every day by saying a bunch of different phrases. So far, the Swedish support seems to be a couple of months away. The test has been going on for eight weeks and several of our sources say that Siri has difficulty answering several, fairly simple questions.

There's even a video of a HomePod mini in action:

There is no telling when Apple will release the HomePod mini in Sweden or when Siri will officially speak Swedish, but the news that tests are underway should be good news to those who want to be able to bag Apple's smart speaker in the country.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

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