One of my favorite Siri features is the Shopping List. I love the fact that HomePod Siri supports this feature. To try this yourself, fire up Siri on your HomePod or on the iPhone used to set up your HomePod and say:

Add milk to the shopping list

If you don’t yet have a list named Shopping, Siri will ask if you want her to create one for you. Say yes. Next, tell Siri:

What’s on my shopping list?

Siri should read your list. The key here is that your shopping list is shared between your HomePod and iPhone. This gives you the ease of saying “Hey Siri, add zzz to my shopping list” pretty much anywhere within hearing distance of your HomePod. Then, when you get to the store, pull out your iPhone and either have Siri read the list, or fire up Reminders and tap the shopping list (that’s where the list is stored).

One small complaint: To me, a key to a shopping list, especially if you live with other people, is sharing. If you use HomePod to create a shopping list (as we did above), the shopping list will default to being locally stored on the iPhone used to setup the HomePod. As far as I can tell, once a locally stored list is setup, there’s no way to change the sharing settings for that list to share on iCloud (please do ping me if I’m wrong about this).

A better path: If you find that your shopping list is, indeed, stored locally and not in iCloud, do this:

• Fire up Reminders on your Mac or iOS device
• Delete any existing Shopping list (copy down any items on there first)
• Tap the + to create a new list. When prompted, save it on iCloud. Name it Shopping.

Now, when you ask HomePod Siri (or any of your Siris, really) to add an item to your Shopping list, you’ll have access to the same list on all your devices.

Note that there is nothing special about the name Shopping, either. You could call your list Grocery or Stanley. Just ask Siri to add an item to the XXX list, where XXX is the name of that list. Key is for the list to live in the cloud.

UPDATE: I have gotten some pings telling me that I can already share Lists. True, but the point here is that HomePod Siri creates the list as a local list. My issue is, once a list is local, I can’t find a way to change it so it is stored in iCloud. Once the list is in iCloud, sharing is easy.