How to request a personalized daily briefing on your Apple devices

Siri Personal Update - hero image

Amazon Echo owners have long been able to request their daily briefing from Alexa. And now, you can request a personalized daily snapshot on your Apple devices, and we show you how,

Welcome to the Personal Update

Dubbed Personal Update, this feature was conceived to help you become more productive with a personalized briefing of your day that includes the following updates:

  • Current weather conditions
  • Calendar appointments
  • To-dos from the Reminders app
  • Traffic on your daily commute
  • Latest news

You can remove news from your daily briefing, but not the other items.

Personal Update: system requirements

Personal Update is supported on these devices and OS versions:

Learn how to identify your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or HomePod model.

How to request a personal update

Simply tell the Siri assistant that you’d like to hear a personal snapshot of your day:

  • “What’s my update?”
  • “Personal Update”
  • “Hey Siri, daily briefing!”

Any of the above, or some such, will do the trick.

Siri will first read you the weather forecast for the day. Next, you’ll hear about any appointments that are on your calendar, followed by the current travel time and traffic conditions to any of the places Siri knows you’re going today. Your personal update concludes with a regional news update from reputable sources such as NPR, CNN and the BBC.

Siri Personal Update - splash screen with Siri

If you request a personal update several times on any given day, Siri will ask you to confirm that you’d like to hear the news again. “You’ve already played the latest news today,” Siri may respond. “Want to play it again?” This lets you remove the news from your personal update.

How to use Personal Requests for Siri on HomePod

Removing news from your personal update

Since listening to the latest news takes more time than hearing your other personal updates, Siri will warn you if you request your briefing more than once per day, informing you that you’ve already played the latest news today and asking if you’d like to play it again.

You may even see a prompt informing you that you can remove the news altogether from your daily briefing by saying something along the lines of:

  • “Remove the news from my update”

If you change your mind later, re-add the news section to your personal update by saying:

  • “Add the news to my daily brief”

No other section can be removed from your personal update, only the news.

Personal Update and Personal Requests

Apple with the HomePod brought a privacy-preserving feature, dubbed Personal Requests. It makes private information from apps such as Messages or Calendar inaccessible through the speaker unless you set up Personal Requests so that Siri recognizes individual voices.

How to have Siri read you the latest news

If you have set up Personal Requests to require authentication on your iPhone before reading your personal information, asking the Siri speaker about your daily update may yields a message saying you need to unlock your iPhone for that. And when you do unlock the handset, Siri will read the requested piece of information on the phone rather than HomePod (for that to work, your iPhone must be on the same Wi-Fi network as your HomePod).

Siri Personal Update - iPhone screenshot

To prevent that from happening, you can disable authentication for personal requests: in the Home app on your iPhone, touch and hold your HomePod speaker. After a popup card appears, scroll a bit down and hit the settings cog icon. Now touch the option “Personal Request” underneath the “Siri” heading, then select “Never” under “Request Authentication.”

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Authentication on your iPhone will be no longer needed when asking Siri to deliver your daily briefing or read your personal information, such as notes, reminders and calendar events.