Apple in the iOS 14.5 beta added a new option to help Siri learn to select your preferred audio apps for listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks, a feature that will undoubtedly be appealing to non-Apple Music fans.
When you ask Siri to play a song, album, podcast, or book, Siri will prompt you for your preferred app. This is not a default setting, but Siri will use this information to learn your app preferences and will select the apps you want to use when you make requests.
There is no specific toggle for you to turn on to select a music service, and Siri may ask again, but this is a way to get Siri to choose the apps you use instead of automatically opening default apps like Apple Music.
How to Choose a Preferred Music Service Using Siri
- Update to iOS 14.5 or iPadOS 14.5 on the iPad.
- Ask Siri to play an artist, song, or album with a request like "Hey Siri, play Fleetwood Mac."
- Siri will pop up a list of all music apps you have installed, and will ask "Which app would you like to use?"
- Choose your preferred music app from the list.
- If asked, confirm that Siri can access data from your music app.
- From there, Siri will play the music in your app of choice. If you chose Spotify, for example, the music content will play in Spotify.
Siri will tell you which music app was selected when the song plays, and you can also see an icon from the music app in the Now Playing window.
It's been possible to play music from other services by clarifying which service you want Siri to use, such as "Hey Siri, play music on Spotify," but the change implemented in iOS 14.5 makes the Siri remember your music app of choice so a simple command like "Hey Siri play music" will use your favorite app rather than defaulting to Apple Music. This also works for podcasts, audiobooks, and other audio content.
How to Change Your Default Music Service
At the current time, there's no Siri command or music setting to manually change the default music app that you've set through the Siri There is no option for manually changing your preferred music service as this is meant to be a Siri intelligence feature where Siri learns preferences over time.
You can ask Siri to play music on a different music service and sometimes that will shift the default. So if you've set Spotify as your default but want to change back to Apple Music, you can say "Hey Siri, play Fleetwood Mac on Apple Music," or vice versa, "Hey Siri, play Fleetwood Mac on Spotify."
Siri will also occasionally bring up the popup asking you which app you want to use when you make a request so that it can keep current with your preferences.
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