If you’re a seasoned Apple Watch wearer, you likely use “Siri” or “Hey Siri” (old habits die hard) voice commands for a whole bunch of things. To call or text your friends. To set timers and alarms. To start or end workouts. To play music. Or to answer the odd question about the weather. Basically anything to prevent you having to navigate its tiny screen or take your iPhone out of your pocket.
Well, as of recently, you can ask Siri some new things — specifically about your health and fitness.
Thanks to a software update, watchOS 10.2, you can finally grant Siri access to information from your Health app. This allows you to ask the voice assistant specific things about your fitness and health. Here are some examples.
- “How far did I run yesterday?” or “How far have I ran this week?”
- “What’s my heart rate?” or “What’s my average heart rate today?”
- “Did I close my exercise ring?”
- “How much did I sleep last night?” or “How much sleep did I average this week?”
You can also give Siri voice commands to log various information into the Health app for you. Once you weigh yourself, you can ask Siri to log your weight. If you took certain vitamins or medications — provided you’ve added the specifics manually in the Health app beforehand — you can have Siri log those in, too. For more information about what you can ask Siri, check out Apple’s press release.
However, there’s a catch.
You can only do all this if you have one of the newest Apple Watches, the Series 9 and Ultra 2. The reason is that these newer models have the newest S9 chip that enables on-device Siri processing; they’re the only models that don’t risk your health data getting sent to the cloud.
