Set channel or change channel with Siri (iOS12)

So I just got Siri Short cuts working to turn the tv on/off in different rooms which is pretty awesome. Anyways, when my parents are in town it is always hard for them to figure out how to get the tv on/off with just our iPads and iPhones so the voice now solves one of those problems.

It would be cool if we could say "set family room tv to NBC" for example or "turn the family room tv to channel 1233"

Is this possible?

Thanks

You can do that today by creating an Activity that sends the specific command to tune the specific channel.

Siri does not support "variables" as I discuss in another thread here. So there is no generic tune ____ syntax that Siri will process and then you would just create a single Intent and specify the channel by voice dynamically. While Siri supports that in the underlying infrastructure, at the voice level all commands are known ahead of time and non-dynamic.

So anyway, the short version is you can do that right now by creating activities with the commands you want. The good part about doing it that way is you can also specify exactly how you want to say it. So if you just want to raise your Watch to your wrist and mumble "HBO" into it to change the channel to HBO, you can do that.

Thanks. The only downfall is it would make several activities long visible while use the app. Is there anyway to create an activity and not have it show in the activities list you see (so the tune HBO example for instance) would be hidden from the app and voice only?

Put Activities like that into the default "Home" room.