Latest Apple TV beta brings Siri support to Apple Music
As reported by iDownloadBlog, the beta for tvOS 9.1 adds full voice commands for Apple Music, letting users search for songs and control playback. Supported commands include “Search for (artist, album, or song),” “Play (artist, album, song, or playlist),” and “Play Beats 1.”
Beta versions of tvOS are available to anyone with an Apple Developer account, which costs $99 per year. Apple offers public beta versions of its iOS and Mac OS X software, but has not yet done the same for Apple TV.
While Apple hasn’t given an exact release date for Siri music controls on Apple TV, the company said in a recent earnings call that the feature will arrive at “the beginning of next year.” With the beta version already out, it sounds like Apple should have no problem hitting that target.
Why this matters: Given the rich voice controls of the new Apple TV, the inability to search for music this way is one of the device’s biggest pain points out of the gate. We already knew users wouldn’t have to wait too much longer, and now developers can get an early jump.