I was able to create them in the shortcuts app immediately after listening via the BBC Sounds app. Looks like functionality was added 3 months ago
Thanks, I’ve just tried that and it appeared. Very interesting behaviour from the Shortcuts app!
I’ve created one and will be interested to see if it propagates to my HomePods.
ETA: so, just been experimenting. I created Sounds shortcuts for radio 2, 4 and 6 and put voice tags on them. Initially trying the voice tags on my iPhone caused the Sounds app to crash, but after a minute or two that seemed to settle down. With that working I tried from my HomePod.
The first one I tried it with said (to paraphrase) ‘turn on personal requests’. I went and tried with a HomePod in a different room, with ‘personal requests’ turned on. It worked! I was excited!
When I went back to my iPhone I noticed it has Sounds running in the background. It looked like the Siri Shortcut was starting Sounds on my iPhone and sending the output to my HomePod. I put my iPhone into Airplane Mode then tried again. The HomePod basically gave me the time-out speech which you would normally get if WiFi was down.
So, if there is just you at home, you could use this now to stream radio via your HomePod. If there are two or more people in the house and you might want to stream when the ‘active’account is out of the house I suspect you will be out of luck...
But with iOS 13 HomePod multi-user is coming so that should make this viable if a bit clunky versus streaming natively from the HomePod.