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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1384448
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. 4. The Siri Remote Okay, we know the original Siri Remote was, shall we say, “controversial?” Some folks actually liked it, and a few tolerated it, but most Apple TV users generally hated it with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Still, we think Apple had the right idea with the original Siri Remote — it just went way too far in the execution of it. In an era when most TV remotes are over-engineered eyesores, there was a minimalist elegance to Apple’s remote that was a nice breath of fresh air. Now, the second-generation Siri Remote has corrected all the mistakes of its predecessor while maintaining the design ethos that was its one piece of potential greatness. The new Siri Remote feels solid in the hand, with just the right number of buttons and controls to provide for an intuitive user experience. With not even a single unnecessary button present, the result is an uncluttered experience that most other remote makers should really take a lesson from. The various gestures available on the clickpad are handy and accessible without getting in the way, and there are distinct power and mute buttons available too. Of course, some people like more complicated remotes, and the Siri Remote won’t do you much good if you also need to regularly control other devices like your TV or game console, but the good news is that you don’t have to use the Siri Remote with the Apple TV if you don’t want to. At least some of the newest smart TVs will pass their remote commands over to the Apple TV via HDMI-CEC, so you may be surprised to discover that your TV remote just works with the Apple TV when it’s the active input. However, even if you can’t do that, tvOS still lets you explicitly pair up any infrared remote you may have lying around to use it to control your Apple TV. 3. Universal Apps Although your smart TV may have every streaming app that you could possibly need, that won’t necessarily be the case for most of your other favourite iPhone and iPad apps. Since it runs a derivative of iOS, however, you’ll have a much better chance of getting a unified app experience