Apple and partners are slowly but surely extending the Siri-powered universal search capabilities of Apple TV. It now supports 64 apps in the US as well as a handful of services in countries such as the UK, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany.
Siri-powered universal search
”Siri, find the latest James Bond movie”. Apple TV lets you search for content in multiple apps at once by speaking commands to the ‘Siri Remote’.
With the addition of Discovery’s apps as well as Filmstruck, Shudder, and Sundance Now, the universal search feature now supports a total of 64 apps in the US. These also include major services such as Netflix, HBO, NBC, iTunes, and Hulu.
Siri universal search is also supported in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. However, only a handful of apps are supported in these regions. An updated list is available from Apple here.
At WWDC 2017, Apple announced that Amazon Prime Video will soon be coming to Apple TV and will be included in the ‘TV’ app, which most likely also means that it will be included in universal search.
Competing TV platforms offer universal search capabilities, too. Amazon boasts that it has more than 90 partners on-board, including Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and of course Amazon Prime Video. Google’s Android TV and Roku are similarly working on expanding their respective catalogs.
Apple says that support for more apps is “coming soon”. It has also promised to roll out Siri support on Apple TV to more regions in the near future. Siri already speaks some languages that are supported on iPhone/iPad but not yet Apple TV.
