Siri Is More Powerful on the Apple TV

Even though Apple has been quick to add AirPlay 2, HomeKit, and Apple TV+ to just about every other smart TV and streaming box on the market, one feature that remains absolutely exclusive to Apple’s own devices is Siri.

Most modern smart TVs can do Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, of course, but if you’re a Siri user, you’re going to want your set-top box to live in the same ecosystem and understand the language you’ve already learned. After all, we’re nowhere near the intuitive voice recognition capabilities of Star Trek, so every voice assistant has its quirks and syntax that you have to learn to deal with.

It’s also worth mentioning that Siri is hugely underrated on the Apple TV. It actually works so well on the set-top box you’ll often wonder why it often seems to be so much less capable everywhere else. In fact, it’s such a great TV voice assistant that it actually won an Emmy Award.

For example, you can call up any show on just about any streaming service with a simple Siri command like “Play Frasier, Season 11, episode 3.” Or “play the episode of Big Bang Theory with Steve Wozniak.”

This also works if you’re not quite sure what you want to watch. Commands like “Show me action films from the 90s” or “Give me a list of thrillers” or “Show me new movies on Netflix” all work great.

Further, thanks to Apple’s universal indexing across multiple streaming apps, you don’t even need to specify which app you want to use unless a show is available on more than one. For example, asking Siri simply to “play The Mandalorian” will go straight to Disney+.

You can also use Siri to jump to a specific spot in any given show using commands like “Skip forward five minutes” or “Go to the one-hour mark,” and the classic “What did she just say?” will skip back a few seconds and temporarily enable closed captioning, so you can read it for yourself.