How to not have to say ‘hey Siri’ in macOS Sonoma

From macOS 14 onwards, in theory you can now say “Siri” to invoke Apple’s digital assistant on your Mac, instead of “Hey, Siri.” In theory, that slightly shorter invocation works just the same as it does on iPhones running iOS 17.

In practice, at least so far, good luck getting your Mac’s Siri to respond instead of your other devices.

Apple has amazing algorithms that figure out that if you say “Hey, Siri,” right after you’ve turned your wrist to look at your Apple Watch, that it’s the Watch you’re talking to. Or in a room full of Apple devices, the moment you say the word “Siri,” they all talk to each other to figure out which one you most recently used.

But however clever those algorithms may be, in reality if you even switch off your iPhone completely before you say the word “Siri,” it will be someone else’s iPhone that responds before your Mac does.

Nonetheless, if you are working completely alone, with every other device off, the Mac can now respond to just the word “Siri” — if four things are true.

1. It’s an Apple Silicon Mac
2. It has a microphone (internal, external, or in Apple Studio Display)
3. You’ve enabled “Listen for ‘Siri’ or ‘Hey Siri’
4. You have an internet connection

That microphone can be an external one, so just plugging a mic into your Mac mini or your Mac Pro will work fine.

To enable verbal use of Siri, you typically just go through these steps:

1. Open Settings
2. Click on Siri & Spotlight
3. Make sure Ask Siri is turned on
4. Choose from the Listen for options

In that same section, you should also turn on Allow Siri when locked, but that’s a convenience rather than a necessity.

The choice you make in the Listen for section is what’s crucial. Your choices now in macOS Sonoma are: “‘Siri or Hey Siri’,” “Hey Siri”, or Off.

Note that when you turn on Listen for “Siri,”, your Mac may take you through a series of prompts to train it to learn your voice.

But it may not. A Mac running macOS Ventura required training, while a macOS Sonoma beta did not.

That could be a fluke of the beta testing, however.

Once you’re used to saying “Siri” instead of “Hey, Siri,” it is peculiar how much more natural it seems — on your iPhone. With a Mac, the phrase is better, but the key issue of whether macOS will listen before your iPhone does has not improved.

Plus Siri on a Mac requires you to stop what you’re doing. Whether it’s that you’re saying a command aloud or you’re first pressing keyboard shortcut, there’s no way to keep writing a document while asking Siri to look up a fact for you.

That alone makes Siri substantially less useful on a Mac. It’s functionally the same on an iPhone — you pause what you’re doing to say something to Siri — but on a Mac you could have typed the instruction before Siri even gets back to you.

But that’s why it’s convenient to turn on Allow Siri when unlocked. As you’re stepping away from the Mac’s keyboard, you can ask Siri on the Mac to do something and it’s now more natural because you don’t have to keep saying “hey.”

That is another thing about the move from “Hey, Siri,” to just “Siri.” Apple said that with the iPhone, you would now also be able to keep talking to Siri with a series of commands and not have to keep saying “hey” or even “Siri” at all.

So far during the macOS Sonoma beta testing, that doesn’t appear to be the case with the Mac. It is deeply dependent on what you’re asking Siri, though, so it may yet be that there are certain commands you can issue like you’re having a conversation.

Apple has made it so that you need one fewer words to call up Siri, but you can go further and ignore the whole entire thing of issuing any verbal invocation. Instead, you can press a keyboard shortcut to make Siri appear.

That doesn’t seem as good as having a fairly natural conversation with your Mac, but it does also get around the issue of which device you want to talk to. While your fingers are pressing this keystroke on the Mac, Siri is not going to assume you mean your iPhone.

You can set this shortcut to one of a few options, but a default is for you to hold down Command and Space together for a few seconds until the Siri icon appears.