“Hey Siri, play some news”

Siri on iOS 11.2, iOS 11.2.2 and the iOS 11.2.5 beta, which is currently being tested with Apple’s registered developers and public beta testers, has picked up the ability to instantly stream an appropriate daily news brief podcast when asked about your news hands-free.

Originally added to the iOS 11.2.5 beta in the United States, the feature has now rolled out to non-beta users and those in the United Kingdom. Supported news sources include ABC, SBS and Seven Network in the United States and BBC News in the United Kingdom, among others.

To listen to the latest news, say something like, “Hey Siri, play some news”, “Hey Siri, give me the news”, “Hey Siri, what’s the news today” or some such. Doing so will by default stream a daily news podcast from NPR in the United States and BBC News in the United Kingdom.

Siri will play the selected show in Apple’s Podcast app, available free of charge on App Store.

If you don’t have the Podcasts app installed on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, the digital assistant will fall back to playing whatever you were last listening to.

You can ask Siri to read news from specific news sources, too, like the Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, ABC, SBS, Seven Network, BBC, Sky News, LBC, ESPN, Apple Music and more.

For example, “Hey Siri, play some news from The Washington Post” will do the trick. You can also ask for business, sports or music news, as per Apple’s iPhone User Guide for iOS 11.2.

Of course, this handy new Siri command is just shorthand to play a third-party news podcast.

In order to test this feature, your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch must be running iOS 11.2 or the iOS 11.2.5 beta or the current stable version of iOS, which is iOS 11.2.2. Also, your on-device regional settings must be set to United States or United Kingdom.

If you live in an unsupported country, changing your regional settings to United States will let you test this nifty new feature, as well as other US-only features on iOS, like Apple News.

You can even ask Siri to play some fake news, which will effectively prompt her to start playing Earwolf’s “Fake the Nation” news podcast with Negin Farsad.

I mean, how cool is that?

Don’t confuse this capability with a News and Sports section in Apple Music’s Radio section. Also, this new feature works only when Siri is invoked through the “Hey Siri” hot word and when using the digital assistant handsfree via headphones or CarPlay.

Asking about the news when Siri is manually invoked instead serves up textual news headlines from Apple News or web sources if Apple News is unavailable or not installed on the device.

This capability is almost certainly going to be added to the upcoming HomePod speaker.