Hey Siri Not Working With Spotify? Here’s the Fix

In short: If Siri is not working with Spotify, turn off the “Hey Spotify” feature. You should also disable Spotify’s access to your microphone to prevent Spotify from interfering with Siri.

One of the perks of using an iPhone is commanding Siri to play music from your favorite apps, like Spotify. Unfortunately, sometimes Siri won’t play Spotify. Here’s what you can do.

Table of Contents

1. Give Siri access to Spotify

The “Hey Siri” feature won’t work with Spotify if you haven’t given Siri access to the Spotify app. To make Siri work with Spotify, make sure you enable Spotify to use with Ask Siri.

Open Settings on your iPhone.
Scroll down and select the Spotify app.
Tap on Siri & Search.
Enable Use with Ask Siri.

If giving Siri access to Spotify doesn’t work, go to Settings > Siri & Search. Turn off “Listen for “Hey Siri”, “Press Side Button for Siri”, and “Allow Siri When Locked”.

Restart your iPhone and then both back on and test.

2. Be specific with your commands

Make sure to be specific with your commands when using Siri to control Spotify. You should end each command with “on Spotify” so Siri knows which service to access.

Try asking Siri to play any specific content, such as an artist or a playlist you have. For example, “Hey, Siri, play my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify”.

3. Use “the” instead of “my”

I found that if you ask Siri to play “my” playlist or liked songs it will not work. Try asking Siri to play “the” playlist or liked songs instead. For some reason, this command works better.

Another command you can try is “Hey Siri, shuffle play Liked songs on Spotify.” This might not work for everyone but that specific command allowed me to listen to my favorite songs.

For people who have never been able to make Siri work with their favorite songs, you could try gathering them all into one playlist and command Siri to play that playlist instead.

Maybe it is a feature yet to be added.

4. Turn off the “Hey Spotify” feature

If “Hey Spotify” is on then Siri doesn’t work. Turn ”Hey Spotify” off. When “Hey Spotify” is turned on, it takes priority over “Hey Siri”. You can’t use them both at the same time.

It would totally make sense for Siri to not work when the Spotify app’s voice control feature is turned on because your device is basically listening for “Hey Spotify” instead of “Hey Siri”.

To turn it off, tap the gear icon to go to Settings, then tap “Voice interactions.” You can turn off “Hey Spotify” or tap mic permissions to disable the voice feature completely.

Spotify’s voice control feature is only available to Premium users inside the United States. If your account is not registered in the US, you won’t see any option to activate the microphone.

If you live in the United States, turning off the “Hey Spotify” feature is enough to get Siri working with Spotify. For people outside of the US, you need to disable Spotify’s microphone access.

5. Disable Spotify’s microphone access

You have to disable Spotify’s access to your microphone. Spotify having access to your microphone, for whatever reason, prevents Siri from working while Spotify is running.

I was also having the same issue with YouTube. Siri wouldn’t play over audio from either app. I disabled the microphone access for both of them, and it seems to have worked.

You can disable Spotify’s voice control feature from the app if your account is registered in the United States. But if you live somewhere else, you can disable it from your iPhone’s settings.

Just make sure to disable “Hey Spotify” first before turning off microphone access.

If you have never received a pop-up, chances are the Spotify app already has access to your microphone, and that all depends on your phone’s settings.

How to disable Spotify microphone permission on iOS:

Go to Settings on your iPhone.
Select Privacy.
Select Microphone.
You’ll see a list of every app that has access to your microphone.
Find Spotify, and turn the toggle off.

The “Hey Spotify” feature is like a double-edged sword in my opinion. What is happening is that it is keeping your audio channel on your mobile phone open the entire time.

Because the audio channel is open, it is basically like a phone call, and if you were to say the Siri phrase while on the phone call, Siri would not activate either.

This is also why the “Hey Spotify” feature also affects navigation while playing music.

Don’t worry. Turning off microphone access shouldn’t prevent any videos/songs from playing. Unless you stream on the YouTube app, it shouldn’t interrupt your experience.

5. Siri works best with Apple Music

At the end of the day, you should consider the fact that Siri works best with Apple Music, not Spotify. This is because Apple Music is an app developed by Apple.

For some reason, Siri works just fine with Apple Music, but not with Spotify. The weird thing is, it can access the “now playing” feature but if it’s asked to play music I get the same reply.

After I ask Siri to play a song on Spotify (on my iPhone XR), I get the answer “I can’t play from Spotify on this device”. I contacted Apple to see how they respond to this.

In the end, they told me to contact the app developers. Siri is still working with other apps and Spotify works manually. So, the only thing that isn’t working is Siri’s commands for Spotify.

So, I talked to Spotify’s support and they couldn’t fix it and told me to ask Apple again. I guess no one knows how to fix the problem, and we’ll probably need to wait for some kind of update.

Most of the time, Siri can work with Spotify but after an update or two, it doesn’t work. The technical team is working on that and I hope it’s only a matter of time before they work.