Intermittent Siri Some of your devices are not responding

Hello,

I've been having this problem basically forever, but I intermittently when trying to activate X10 Lights via HomeKit, I get by Siri "Some of your devices are not responding, please try again later", or sometimes "Your devices are taking a long time to respond". Try it again or try it twice and it works. Looking at HomeKit, you can sometimes see all of the devices say "No Response" but refresh the screen (swipe left or right) and then they are responding properly and work fine. It seems that HomeKit Bridge goes idle and HomeKit has problems connecting to it when it does this. Once it 'wakes up', it works perfectly and has no issues. I never have problems though when I use the location stuff in HomeKit to turn the outside lights on when I get home for example. I also use HomeBridge and that doesn't seem to ever go into No Responding status for my devices which are outside of Indigo.

Are there any settings which can be tweaked for this? I'm surprised other people don't seem to be having this issue, it would be nice to fix.

I will often have to rephrase from “Hey Siri, turn on device x.” to the more direct, “Hey Siri, Device X on.” That often works. However, after doing the recent Catalina security updates today, Homekit seems to still recognize devices and take action on them but speaking to Siri does not. She replies that your device is taking a long time to respond. I suppose I will have to do some Homepod Mini resets tomorrow and see if that helps.

Just to close this thread, I think I found my problem. I was having spanning tree problems that was occasionally causing packet loss on my wired ethernet attached devices. Since fixing that, this issue seems to have gone away. Interesting though that I never had problems with automatic things issuing Indigo actions. Like coming home, my outdoor lights would ALWAYS come on when I was near the house, or any automated timers. It was only Siri that seemed to be affected by this issue (and when I opened the home app, I'd see devices not responding and have to swipe to the left or right and go back). Perhaps homekit actions have a retry built in where as Siri requests do not? Hard to say, but things seem to be working better.