I’m a creature of habit and have set my smart home up to reflect this. My weekday morning routine includes a wake up scene that:

Turns the Philips Hue lightstrip in the bedroom to a cool white glow (which I’m told is best for waking up to)

Disarms the alarm system

Sets the Kitchen Sonos to Radio 4 (via the Sonos app, not HomeKit)

This routine works well, most of the time. What’s annoying is that on occasion, I may need to get up earlier, or when I have a day off (try) to have a lie in, however, this scene still gets triggered at 6am regardless of when I actually wake up. There’s a couple of simple ways that HomeKit could fix this:

Integrate with the iOS alarm so that a scene can be triggered either inline with the alarm, or after it’s been disabled.

Use the Apple watch as a sensor to know when I’m awake.

Use motion sensors to detect if people are moving around and therefore awake.

Detect usage of accessories as an indicator of activity within the house.

This is a symptom of the current iteration of the “smart” home; everything is too literal. Even with the improvements for scene triggers and variables in iOS11, actually enabling them is still a manual process. At the minute, I have a convenient home, but I look forward to the day that my home really understands and can learn from me, removing the need to think about manually creating scenes and automations.