My smart speakers took three seconds to respond until I found what was really hogging the Wi-Fi

Published Sep 11, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Samir Makwana is a technology journalist and editor from India since past 18 years and his work appears on MakeUseOf, HowToGeek, GSMArena, BGR, GuidingTech, The Inquisitr, TechInAsia, TechWiser, and others. He has written news, features, and gadget reviews for national technology media publications. His passion is to help people with their technology problems and gadget purchases. For that, he has worked for some of the biggest international technology publications, covering news, explainers, how-to guides, listicles, and product-buying guides. He has worked as an editor and managed teams since 2015. His expertise broadly covers computers, smartphones, game consoles, headphones, smart home products, browsers, and apps. A smart home rarely feels complete without using smart speakers to get something done. That turns into a specific kind of annoyance. I ask my smart speaker to turn off a light, and then stand there counting seconds. Begrudgingly, I got used to the wait time until I had enough. That was my house for a couple of months when I ran a first-gen HomePod and a first-gen Amazon Echo Plus to manage my home. Over time, I got uncomfortable with the three-second delay when I turned off the lights at night. I experienced the same behavior from the smart speaker for anything I asked. It didn’t matter if I was asking Siri or Alexa to manage something. With that familiar lag, I assumed that the smart speakers were the problem. I was wrong, and it took me longer than I’d like to figure out why. Ruling out the smart speaker hardware first Firmware updates and resets changed nothing When the smart speakers took more than a few seconds to respond, I power-cycled them at first. The first week or so went into ruling out the hardware itself. I used first-gen Echo Plus alongside the first-gen HomePod. Both were totally different ecosystems. Of all the common aspects, the one thing that came out on top for me was the lag. Sometimes the Echo Plus took a little longer. I updated the smart speakers’ firmware to rule out any software issues. When that didn’t help, I suspected a potential hardware issue and was convinced about a theory that the mic array on one of them had gone bad. At least one of them would’ve behaved better than the other. But neither of them did. After a couple of resets, I realized the problem wasn't about the speaker at all. Something between the wake word and response was eating up time; I concluded the problem wasn’t happening inside the speaker. The Wi-Fi setup looked solid in the settings Strong signal strength didn’t help with queue delays I admit that I lost another week or two chasing a stronger signal strength for the smart speakers. Both HomePod and Echo Plus gave solid full bars while they sat close to an access point. Like many, I saw a good signal strength and didn’t question anything. But the Wi-Fi signal strength is a terrible indicator of real performance. Other devices in the same space were the real bottleneck PS5 downloads and Jellyfin streams were hogging the radio All I wanted them to do was carry a voice command packet to their own servers and return with a response. Instead, my HP ProDesk 600 G6 mini PC was transcoding a Jellyfin stream to the living room TV and my PS5 was downloading a 40GB game. Both activities were using the 5GHz radio, along with the HomePod and Echo Plus, which sat a few feet away. Neither was moving small, latency-sensitive packets. Meanwhile, my router treated every request the same; none mattered more than the other. Each request was handled on a first-come, first-served basis. On top of that, I hadn’t enabled any prioritization on my router, so it treated every request the same. That’s why many time-sensitive requests got stuck behind other traffic, and the router didn’t care how long it took to process. Each speaker asked a question and got a response in a reasonable time. The server's answer kept getting stuck in traffic on its way back. Turning on QoS fixed what months of troubleshooting didn’t My router’s adaptive QoS placed voice traffic ahead of others After I learned what was competing for bandwidth, the fix was almost boring. I never bothered turning on the Adaptive QoS feature on my ASUS RT-AX88U router, because I didn’t think I needed it. When I enabled it, I set it to prioritize the latency-sensitive traffic over large transfers. That means smaller packets carrying conversational data get to move faster than my PS5 game downloads or Jellyfin streams. The difference was far from subtle. The voice commands that took three seconds were answered almost the moment I finished talking. This behavior stayed consistent no matter when I tested it. Even during the peak streaming hours in the evening, it worked fine. It didn’t take long after that to find what was actually eating the bandwidth. Since every cloud round trip starts with a lookup, I peeked into the DNS. I even ran Pi-hole network-wide on the same router for a few months and eventually tore it down. It had turned into one more thing I needed to maintain for my house. So returning to that to shave off a few milliseconds didn’t sit well with me. I pointed my router to a faster public DNS resolver without a filtering layer. That helped make things faster in addition to the QoS fix. Both fixes were entirely on the network side and never touched either smart speaker. The speaker was only ever a messenger Smart speakers often end up taking the blame for problems that have nothing to do with them. My HomePod and Echo Plus took the fall before I found what was actually going on. The delay showed up on the device I was talking to, not at the reason actually causing it. If your commands to the smart speakers have gotten sluggish, and you’ve ruled out the obvious stuff, check your access point. You don’t necessarily need to reset or replace the speaker. A saturated Wi-Fi radio and a lack of traffic prioritization can make even a brand-new speaker feel slow. If you’ve already sorted out the lag and are still annoyed with the wait times to hear a response, you now know what to do. But if your smart speakers still need hand-holding to do things on their own, you can get rid of that headache too. Apple HomePod 2 The HomePod 2 comes with a large build, loud sound, wide touchscreen, and more. It seamlessly connects to other Apple devices and offers room temperature and humidity sensors. Amazon Echo (4th Gen) The Amazon Echo is the best all-around smart speaker for most people with a nice design, great sound, and the immense power of the Alexa ecosystem at its disposal.