Get Song Lyrics with Siri from the iPhone or iPad

Everyones favorite digital friend Siri can improve your music experience and song recollection by retrieving song lyrics for you. Whether you’re aiming for some spontaneous iPhone based Karaoke, looking to settle a dispute over what an artist is saying, wanting to add some lyrics to a song that is missing them, or just wondering what the lyrics to a given song are, Siri doesn’t care, anything goes.

The following three styles of commands issued to Siri will get the lyrics to many songs, summon Siri as usual and try the following:

• “What are the lyrics to [song name] by [artist name]”
• “Get lyrics to [artist name] [song name]”
• “Lyrics to [song name]”

For example, “what are the lyrics to Peter Gabriel San Jacinto” or the shorter “Lyrics to San Jacinto” will work just fine. Though you can sometimes request lyrics just by song name, if there is any ambiguity between the song or artist, or it was covered by multiple artists with differing verses, it’s best to specify both the song and artist name.

Siri lyric retrieval seems to be very effective with popular music and hits of any genre through almost any timeframe, easily retrieving songs that are both on pop charts right now, and classics from 50 years ago:

The lyrics that are retrieved successfully by Siri will come through Wolfram Alpha, like many of the specific data inquiries, funnier requests, and other actually useful commands that you can request through the agent.

On the other hand, searching for some songs yields nothing directly, and this may include popular songs, slightly more obscure music, and songs that aren’t or haven’t been on pop charts of some sort. When this happens, Siri performs a general web search for the song and artist name instead, like so:

Clicking through any of the links that Siri brings back will open a new Safari page with the URL specified by Siri. While this usually leads to the proper song lyrics for the song you’re looking for, it’s a little disappointing that Siri can’t relay them without clicking through to a third party URL, particularly since many lyric collection sites are rubbish (MetroLyrics seems to be OK, for what it’s worth). Presumably, as Siri gets smarter and learns more, or perhaps with a new licensing deal, that won’t happen in the future though.