For years, you’ve been able to ask Alexa or Google Assistant for a daily briefing that includes your local weather, appointments, and even news or traffic on your daily commute. Finally, Apple has given Siri the same capability on both iPhone and HomePod.
To use this new feature, you have to update your devices to iOS 14.2. To update the HomePod, open the Home app on your iPhone and tap the home icon in the upper left, then Home Settings. Scroll down and tap on Software Update in the “Speakers and TVs” section.
Using the new Siri daily briefing is really easy. Just say, “Hey Siri, what’s my update?” or “read my daily update” or something similar.
Siri will give you the weather forecast for the day, tell you about any appointments on your calendar, traffic to any of the places Siri knows you’re going today, and then a news briefing from reputable sources, delivered via the Podcasts app.
On HomePod, this feature uses the Personal Requests function to access your calendar information from your iPhone, so make sure your iPhone is connected to the same network as your HomePod. This also means that it works with multiple users.
There appears to be almost no way to personalize this feature just yet. You can tell Siri “remove news from my daily update” if you don’t want to listen to the news briefings, but there appears to be no settings anywhere to change news sources or enable/disable various parts of the briefing.
This is a long overdue feature and a good first step for Siri, and hopefuly it will be expanded.
Author: Jason Cross, Senior Editor
I have written about technology for my entire professional life - over 25 years. I enjoy learning about how complicated technology works and explaining it in a way anyone can understand.