Get a Personal Update from Siri on iPhone, iPad, Mac

Siri has a neat largely unknown feature called Personal Update, that, when requested, will give you a summary of information from various apps that you may find useful.

Specifically, Personal Update will give you the weather forecast for the day, whatever your calendar events that day are, your reminders, an travel time estimate to locations that Siri is privy to (like work, or school), and a news summary through one of the approved American mainstream media narrative outlets like NPR, Washington Post, Fox News, or CNN.

To try out Siri Personal Update, summon Siri with “Hey Siri” or by holding the Power button for a moment, then say “Hey Siri, what’s my personal update?”

You’ll soon start hearing whatever Siri has to say about your day, including events from your calendar, reminders you have set, a weather forecast, and a news summary.

You can also change the “news” source by asking Siri to give you “news” from one of the other available sanctioned sources (you can have any choice of news you like, as long as it’s one of the four choices made for you), but a better option for most is to simply remove it completely.

If you don’t want to hear the approved “news” narratives, then you can turn that off by telling Siri “Hey Siri, remove the news from my daily update”. (And there are plenty of studies showing that consuming “the news” is bad for you, so it is worth considering the place of ‘news’ in your life and if it belongs in your Personal Update.)

Unfortunately, like many things with using Siri, the Personal Update feature may spontaneously not work, or part of the feature may not work. For example, during your Personal Update you may find that Siri responds with “Calendars and Reminders are not available”, but if you ask again for a Personal Update, it may work the next time.

Don’t forget that you can set your personal information with Siri too, so that Siri knows who you are.

Check out more Siri tips, and if you’re looking for interacting with much more advanced AI that puts Siri to shame, don’t miss out on using ChatGPT.