With iOS 16 you can get Siri to read your notifications out loud – without the need for AirPods. You have complete control about which apps and notifications get read out (so don’t worry about Siri announcing something embarrassing!) but this is a great feature to have if you don’t always have eyes on your iPhone screen. Siri Announcing Notifications is easy to set up and customise and I’ll guide you through the whole process in this simple and easy to follow tutorial.
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A very useful new feature in iOS 16 will let Siri announce your notifications to you so you can hear them even when you aren’t looking at your phone.
Here’s how to turn it on and how it works.
So to get this started we’ll jump into the Settings app and then we’re going to choose Accessibility.
From here you want to find the options for Siri and towards the bottom of that screen you’ll find the option for Announce Notifications on Speaker.
This means that your notifications will come out for your iPhone speaker, not just your AirPods like it used to before iOS 16.
From here we can then tap on the option underneath (once enabled) and choose which apps you want this to work for.
You may not want every single app to be announced out loud for privacy reasons, or perhaps you just get so many notifications your phone will never stop talking!
I’m going to turn on a couple of different options including Messages and I’m going to put on my email client SpaRk as well – that’s so I can show you a demonstration of how this works in a moment.
As you’re choosing app by app you can also, if you want, just have the top priority notifications like Direct Messages – or if you want all notifications from that app to be announced you can customise this on a really granular level to get exactly what you want.
Now all that’s left to do is wait for a notification to come in and this will work just like this:
[SIRI] From Spark. Jacob Woolcock. A very important email. Hi viewer, if you didn’t know your iPhone could do this then please press that Subscribe button.
Very clever stuff indeed!
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