I had assumed you could use Siri for full control on Apple TV. Push the button on the remote, say what you want, and then use your voice to navigate every on-screen prompt.
You can't.
You can use Siri to search for "iTunes" (Apple TV store) movies and television. And that's it. It's basically solely a workflow for finding iTunes content.
It doesn't even seem to use the deep cross-application search that the Apple TV itself can do.
It definitely can't search into Netflix.
The lack of additional voice control commands makes for a really clunky modal switch where you search using Siri but then have to do all the Buy or Rent steps using the clickpad on the remote.
Apple claims it can recognize onscreen labels but this functionality is super flaky. If they're across the top of the screen maybe. If they're buttons, usually not.
This is extra annoying because Apple has at least three workflows for buy or rent, including two vertically stacked Buy | Rent buttons, a single Buy or Rent button that takes you to horizontally scrolling Buy or Rent buttons, and horizontally listed Buy or Rent buttons (in the iTunes apps). And then multiple steps after that to actually rent and play.
Once you have a search result on screen, you should be able to say "Buy and play this movie" or "Rent and play this show". But you can't.
You get ridiculous results, like if you say "Rent", it will search for and find the movie "Rent" rather than renting whatever is on screen, and if you say "Wednesday", it will search for and find a movie called "Wednesday", even if you have Netflix with the TV show.
Even if they just added a voice control clarification like "Label", you could say something like "Label: Rent". But you can't.
You also should at least be able to use qualifiers, like "Wednesday on Netflix". But you can't.
Apple Support - Use Siri on your Apple TV
About the only useful additional Siri feature is "what did they just say?" / "what did he say?", which will rewind ~30 seconds, turn on Closed Captions, replay the scene and turn off closed captions.
You could in theory also use Siri to control playback but I don't see why you would. Turning closed captioning on and off might be useful, although I don't know how good it is about selecting audio and captions languages, if it can do that at all.
You might also in theory use Siri to "type" a search query whenever you have a text search box, but that's mode switching again since you'll have to navigate to the search box using the remote clickpad anyway.
It's basically like a fragment of a feature, rather than full voice control.
Recent Comments