Search Youtube Music with Siri shortcut or home screen icon

By Tree, 25 April, 2019

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I made this Siri shortcut that searches YouTube music with text you either dictate or type. It opens the search results in Safari, and you can then usually play the song with a single tap. I thought someone else might be interested; I believe this link should give you access to the shortcut, so you can use/edit it.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9cb40016e44247c998b10795d83ca623

Some notes on the shortcut.

I do not believe this will work if you have the official you tube music app installed on your phone, because the shortcut just opens the app and loses your search input.

With, or without, this shortcut you should probably use YouTube Music in the browser, not the app, because, you can then use an add blocker to never have to watch adds. YouTube Music might be lacking in some features right now but being able to play almost any song/album/artist on demand, for free, with no adds is sweet. I am using YouTube Music all day long on the desktop at my job.

A brief explanation of the shortcut's steps, so you can better understand, exactly, what it's doing and, perhaps, change things to better suit you.

You summon the shortcut by saying to Siri, search you tube. You can change this prompt, of course, and/or add an icon to the home page etc.

First the shortcut goes into dictation mode, making the typical beep sound. You can say something like, "the white stripes, seven nation army",
"Punk rock",
"Bob Dylan", etc.

After you speak your search, you will hear the second beep, Safari will open, and you will land on the YouTube Music search results page.

If you say nothing, the dictation will time out, and a text field will pop up, where you can type your search, if you don't want to dictate; simply hit ok after you have typed your query.
This option of typing your search, if you don't want to dictate it, was the trickiest part of making the shortcut for me, and someone else might be able to come up with a better approach. As it stands now, it uses an, IF, statement that says, if dictated input is greater than 3 characters long, the dictation output is the search query. If the dictation is not greater than 3 characters, the user is presented with the text field, where a search query can be typed.

The main downside to the above explained method is that if you want to type your search, you have to wait for the dictation to time out. This only takes a second or two, but if you cancel the dictation early, with a magic tap, the entire shortcut is cancelled. If you come up with a better approach let me know.

This shortcut will open the YouTube search page in a new tab in Safari, so if you use it a lot be sure to close your tabs from time to time, double tap and hold on the tabs button at the bottom of the Safari interface.

I'm new to Siri shortcuts, just downloaded the app about an hour ago, so there may be a lot I am missing. I know you can use this shortcut's method to search non-music you tube if you just delete "music." out of the two URL fields within the shortcut. I'm not sure what other websites/services the basic method might work on.

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