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Testing Apple's New Apple Music Voice Plan in iOS 15.2

EuroChilli said:
Like Spotify.

I'm still peeved, to put it mildly, about how Apple Music butchered my carefully curated iTune library. It tool a while, but I managed to put it back together. Apple Music is going to have to try a lot harder to win me back, if at all.



I don't even use Siri for that. The only thing I'll ask Siri to do is to 'name that tune' if I hear a song I like in public, then I play it on Spotify myself, even though I can ask Siri to do that.
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Spotify and Apple Music have really ugly UIs though. I miss the iPod UI of even the first iPhone and definitely coverflow.
 
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MacRumors said:
All in all, it's not a bad idea to choose Apple Music Voice if you're going to use Siri exclusively on something like a HomePod and want to save some money, but there are a lot of additional features that you get with the extra $5 for the full $9.99 per month Apple Music plan.
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Is it just me, or do "HomePod" and "want to save money" simply not belong in the same sentence?
 
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Given how bad Siri is at recognizing the songs I wanna play, a lot of people will be forced to upgrade to Apple Music and search manually.
 
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Even for casual users, there’s no 100% guarantee Siri will pickup “play workout music” every time, let alone searching for specific song/album/artist. On second thought, it seems that This new voice plan suits better for casual listeners among casual listeners: they just want something playing in their ears and nothing else.
 
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Nrwrit3r said:
This plan seems bizarre and I was trying to think of reasons Apple chose to do this. The two that come to mind:

1) To gain subscribers who use other music services (Spotify, Tidal) but own Homepods/apple devices

2) To try and increase the number of people using Siri for ML training purposes

Not sure if folks have other thoughts on why Apple would launch a product like this, but does seem very confusing to me!
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3) To snag people who currently aren't using Apple Music due to cost, and needing only need voice control (like me), but don't want to spend $10/mo, but will gladly pay $5/mo - a 50% discount.
 
My taste in music is far too picky to rent music. I love the all the songs I’ve purchased over 40+ years. Playing rented stuff is just irritating for the most part. Every few years I’ll try a month of Spotify to see if there are new songs I want to purchase, but that’s about it for me.
 
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adamclarkthomas said:
I’m still an iTunes Match only subscriber, and one of the things that drives me bonkers is how you can’t manually queue up songs on a HomePod using an iOS device. Not Airplay-ing songs, but having the HomePod do the playback.

Probably this voice plan wouldn’t enable that ability, but I can dream.
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You can't do this? You can if you have apple music by pressing the now playing tile on the control center, tapping on control other speakers & TVs and then choosing a homepod. Tap the song title on that screen and your music app will open and you can choose songs, add them to up next, etc.
 
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ipedro said:
Apple Music Voice Plan is for people who just want music playing and want to use the Apple Music features of an Apple device with Siri as its primary UI like Apple Watch or HomePod. You're paying less to use the same exact user interface you would already use on a HomePod mini or an Apple Watch with AirPods.

This is to give those users access to Music, if they don't already subscribe. This is not for iPhone or Mac Apple Music users, though it'll still work there. This is not for those who pick specific songs to play. Your way of using Apple Music is outside the scope of this tier and you should (and probably do) have the full Apple Music experience.

If you already go around the house asking your HomePod to "play music that I like" or lift your wrist as you begin a run and say "Hey Siri, play workout music", then this is for you and it'll work the same way, but for half the price.
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Fair enough, but I'd be surprised if we talked about a significant amount of people here. There seem to be an awful lot of qualifications in your description of the target audience and the list of people it's not for seems to be a lot longer than the people it actually is for.

We'll see whether this meets some untapped demand or not. For once I really don't see much of a market.
 
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I changed my Power Button to invoke Tyoe to Siri instead of just speaking.

I’ve been able to ask Siri to play a Pandora station in the Kitchen (HomePod Mini) and it has worked. Perhaps this is a way to type in odd music choices?

I generally just ask Siri/HomePod to play stations:channels via Pandora. I have the Free Pandora with ads


This Voice Plan sounds decent to me and adds a bit for a little. I wish they’d offer a bundle with other services and Voice though.
 
Serious question: what if I try the “type to Siri” feature and just type in my music request?

In any case I can see that being handy for those bands with oddball names…
 
EuroChilli said:
Tempting, but I'm still as happy as a pig in ..it with Spotify premium :)
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Same. I did my Apple Music free trial and their recommendation algorithm was terrible for me. They’ve since offered me a second free trial and I’d much rather pay for Spotify and get music I like.
 
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I just lined up for this "service". Tried for about 30min on my iMac to play a song I wanted. Siri could not find it in my library. So played something else... Eventually I thought Siri can not deal with my accent (English is a second language to me). So I changed the settings to type to Siri. Again failed. I even tried the exact examples from the

How to use Apple Music Voice​

page. Still failed. OK so I walked away from that and tried to do it on my iPhone. Hurray it worked. As this sounds rather pedestrian, I went to my kids room and stole the HomePod mini. That took a moment to line up with my phone. So know I say "Hey Siri...." and get 2 Siris answering back at me. Asking for a song again ends in a mess.

Dear Apple: You. Must. Have. Tried. Hard. To. Stuff. This. Up.

Will cancel this asap.
Romano

​

 
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My personal take is Apple is doing whatever they can do to put a crimp in Spotify’s user base. As it was suggested earlier, they want to have dominate control of the streaming business.

*iTunes Match user
 
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