With Radio Shorties you can listen to more than 20,000 radio stations without having to touch your iPhone. You operate the music app with Siri.
Radio Shorties: Listen to the radio with Siri
Radio Shorties is a new music app that expands Siri’s capabilities. The idea is simple. You create a Siri shortcut by selecting any radio station and pressing the button.
Then you play the music via Siri: “Hey Siri, play Radio538”. You can pause the music by giving another command through the voice assistant. Thanks to AirPlay you can stream the sound to, for example, a HomePod.
Without Radio Shorties you can also turn on radio via Siri, but your choice is limited to Beats1. In total you can choose from 20,000 radio stations worldwide. If you listen to a certain station more often, you can easily add it to your favorites.
In addition, Radio Shorties recommends certain stations based on your listening history, just like Spotify does, for example. The channels are divided according to their character: is it mainly about the music, or is there a lot of talk by DJs? As soon as you have switched on a channel, your screen will show who the artist is, which station you are listening to and what kind of song.
Also read: Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12: How to make Siri smarter and more useful to you
To download
Radio Shorties is free to use and has a 7-day trial period. This is automatically converted into a paid subscription for which you spend at least 1.99 euros per month. As a free user you can only listen to one station: Radio Kiss Kiss, an Italian station. All in all, Radio Shorties is a nice app, but the question is how long it will take for Apple to build the functionality itself in Siri.