If you have updated your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to iOS 11.2.5 or later, you can use Siri in hands-free mode to read out the news to you. You can even ask the smart digital assistant to real aloud news stories limited to specific domains such as entertainment, sports, music or business. Here is how.
This feature is known as Siri News. The feature was designed for hands-free situations when you are not looking at the screen. You can use the feature by invoking Siri via the familiar “Hey Siri” hot phrase, CarPlay or headphones, not when waking her manually by holding on the Home or side button.
Siri News is officially available in the US, UK and Australia. If you live in any other unsupported country, you may still use this feature, but the contents will be in only English.
How to use Siri News on iPhone & iPad
To use Siri News on your iPhone or iPad, first invoke the smart digital assistant using the “Hey Siri” hot phrase, CarPlay or headphones. Next, ask her to read out some news using a simple command like, “Hey Siri, play some news.”
The command is shorthand to play a relevant news podcast. If you haven’t installed the Podcast app on your iPhone or iPad, Siri will fall back to playing whatever you were last listening to.
Siri will play your news podcast in the background and you can get back to using your iPhone or iPad.
If you would like to go directly to the podcast, on the Siri results screen, tap on the “Open Podcast” button. Alternately, you can use the app switcher to navigate to the Podcasts app.
When you ask Siri about the news of the day, it will bring you generic updates. If you want Siri to play the news from a more specific source, you can give Siri a more specific command to read aloud news from one of the supported sources The command could be like, “Hey Siri, play some news from the Washington Post” or alike. Just as I mentioned earlier, you can ask Siri to read about business, sports, entertainment or music news.
Below are a few examples of Siri News queries.
- “Hey Siri, what’s sports news.”
- “Hey Siri, tell me business news.”
- “Hey Siri, play music news.”
- “Hey Siri, read news from the Huffington Post.”
As a nice touch, asking Siri to read aloud some fake news will launch Earwolf’s “Fake the Nation” news podcast with Negin Farsad.
The following sources below are used by default for the aforementioned news genres in the US.
- General—NPR, can switch to Fox News, The Washington Post or CNN content
- Business—CNBC, can switch to Bloomberg content
- Music—Apple Music Beats 1 Radio with Zane Lowe content
- Sports—ESPN, can switch to NBC content
Defaults differ from one country to another so your sources may be different.
For instance, users in the UK will notice that Siri will automatically provide local audio news from Sky News, LBC or BBC.
You can ask Siri to play news from specific sources by ending the command with something like “Hey Siri, switch to [NEWS SOURCE]” as in, “Hey Siri, switch to ESPN.”
Siri News can provide you with the latest news from these sources:
- ABC
- Apple Music
- BBC
- Bloomberg
- CNBC
- CNN
- ESPN
- Fox News
- LBC
- NBC
- NPR
- SBS
- Seven Network
- Sky News
- The Washington Post
Again, you can only use Siri News when using “Hey Siri” or asking the smart digital assistant about your local news of the day in hands-free mode, while using CarPlay or headphones.
If you ask for news after you invoked the assistant manually will result in the assistant bringing up textual new headlines from Apple News or third party web sources if Apple News is not available or not installed on your iPhone or iPad.
Wrapping Up
So what do you think about Siri News? Share your feedback in the comments section below. Also feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.
What exactly is fake news? Is that what you call things you don’t like to hear? And what exactly is biased about getting news from multiple different sources, including Fox News, NPR, CNN, WaPo, Bloomberg, etc?
These short podcasts are from their news divisions,nottheir opinion/editorial divisions. Getting your news from multiple different news sources and their journalists is how you *avoid* most bias in the modern American media environment of conglomeration. If you’re reading op/ed or listening to TV and radio pundits and op/ed, you are doing it wrong.
Do you understand the difference between news reporting and op/ed punditry? Any ‘news’ organization worth a toot has a firewall between the two.