Apple TV: Siri Remote

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we will be checking out all of the buttons and functions of our Siri remote. Now our Siri remote is used for totally controlling our Apple TV. Okay. If we're new to our Apple TV and we are a voiceover user, we just might want to check out our Apple TV beginning voiceover gestures video. It does a pretty good job of quickly getting us navigating through our Apple TV.

All right, so let's check out our Siri remote. Now we have our Siri remote right here in front of us, and we will begin at the very top of our Siri remote and move to the bottom as we explore today. Now at the very top of our remote, we will find our touch surface, and our touch surface acts very much like the surface of our iPhone, our iPad. We'll flick left and right or even up and down on our touch surface to move between the items on our Apple TV. So if we flick to the right, we will move to the next item on our screen. Hey, let's just right flick a couple of times. So we'll just right flick.

Speaker 2: App store, row one, column two.

Douglas Walker: And there's our app store. So let's right flick a couple more times here.

Speaker 2: Movies, row one, column three.

Douglas Walker: And there's our movies app. We'll just right flick again.

Speaker 2: TV shows, row one, column four.

Douglas Walker: And there's our TV shows app. And of course moving or flicking to our left will move us to our previous item here. We'll go ahead and just left flick a couple of times. And we'll just left flick.

Speaker 2: Movies, row one, column three.

Douglas Walker: Great. And there's our movies app again, and we'll just left flick again one more time here.

Speaker 2: App store, row one, column two.

Douglas Walker: Great. Now our touch surface also gives us the ability to select or open any app or item. And once we find the item we want, we simply just press or click our touch surface. So since we're on our app store app here, how about we go ahead and open it up? So we'll just press our touch surface and we'll press.

Speaker 2: Menu selected. Featured tab one of five.

Douglas Walker: All right, we heard kind of a click and our app store app is now open. That's pretty great. Now it's probably good to know how to close our app store or any app that we might have running, right? Well that just so happens to bring us to our next button. This is our menu button. Now our menu button is slightly to our left and just below our touch surface. It's a round button that has a tactile or raised ridge around its edge. Now our menu button acts a lot like a back button, and each time we press our menu button, we're moved back a level. Or in this case, our app is going to close and we will be placed right back on our home screen.

Okay. So we'll go ahead and just tap our menu button and we'll close our app store app here. And we'll just press it.

Speaker 2: App store, row one, column two.

Douglas Walker: Great. Our app store app has closed and we have been placed right back on our home screen.

Okay, our next button is our TV slash home button, and our TV home button is the round button just to the right of our menu button. Now our Apple TV includes our TV App, and we'll just simply press once to launch or open our

Apple TV app. So let's give it a try. We will just press our TV home button.

Speaker 2: Forrest Gump, one of 50.

Douglas Walker: And there we go. Our TV app has opened and we can easily just move through all of our great TV content here. So that's pretty cool. Okay. If we just press our TV home button again, we'll quickly move right back to our home screen. Let's go ahead and just press it. We'll press our home button here.

Speaker 2: App store, row One, column two.

Douglas Walker: Yeah, our TV home button has one more great feature here. We can simply just press it twice quickly to launch our app switcher. And we could flick between our recently opened to apps. And I'll tell you, this works a lot like our app switcher on our iPhone or iPad.

Okay. Our next button is our Siri button. Yeah, we love Siri. Most of the time we Love Siri, right? Anyway, our Siri button is just below our menu button, and to the left side of our remote here. Now it's easy to find because our Siri button has a slight cup or light indention to it. Now, if we're familiar with Siri on our other devices, well Siri on our Apple TV will work much the same way. Now to activate Siri, we simply press and hold down our Siri button. And we can do things like launch our favorite apps, find TV and movie content, which is really cool, because we can say things like "Find our favorite actor." How about we go ahead and give that a try? So we'll just hold down our Siri button. Find movies by Tom Hanks.

Speaker 2: Here are some movies by Tom Hanks. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, one of 19.

Douglas Walker: And there you go. We have a list of really great Tom Hanks movies. So as we can see, Siri can be a really great help to us.

Now another great way to use Siri is by entering text into any text field. Yeah, when we encounter any edit or text field, we can just use our voice instead of using our onscreen keyboard, which is super handy. We'll simply press and hold our Siri button and just simply speak the text that we want to enter. You know, we can even speak individual characters. This is super helpful, especially when entering usernames and passwords. I'll tell you, we love our Siri button.

All right, our next button is our play pause button, and our play pause button is just below our Siri button, and it's another round button, only this one has a flat surface just like our TV home button. Now our play pause button really doesn't take a lot of explanation, because it does what it says it's gonna do. We'll simply just press it to play or pause any of our content, like maybe our music, or of course any movie that we happen to be watching. So our play pause button, it's pretty straightforward for us.

Okay. Our last button is actually our volume toggle button. And our volume button is our long kind of oval button just to the right of our Siri and play pause button. You've probably already guessed that pressing the top part of our volume button will increase our playback volume. And of course pressing the lower part of our volume button will simply decrease our system volume, which is pretty handy for us.

All right. That pretty much covers all of the buttons on our Siri remote. So hey, we are ready to start moving through our Apple TV and checking out all of our great content here.

Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.