INPlayMediaIntent ignores terms like 'music' and 'radio'

Question

I'm working on a media app, and I'd like to improve its Siri interactions. I've implemented an Intents extension, with "radio" as the media category, and I'm refining the resolveMediaItems method. Typically if I tell Siri Play <search query> in <my app>, and then examine the INPlayMediaIntent in the debugger, I see something like this

<INPlayMediaIntent: 0x143f181c0> {
    playShuffled = 0;
    mediaSearch = <INMediaSearch: 0x143d19b50> {
        reference = 0;
        mediaType = 18;
        sortOrder = 0;
        albumName = <null>;
        mediaName = search query;
        genreNames = (
        );
        artistName = <null>;
        moodNames = (
        );
        releaseDate = <null>;
        mediaIdentifier = <null>;
    };
    mediaContainer = <null>;
    playbackRepeatMode = none;
    mediaItems = <null>;
    resumePlayback = 0;
    playbackQueueLocation = now;
    playbackSpeed = <null>;
}

where the mediaSearch.mediaName has the data from the speaker that I can use to resolve the query.

Unfortunately, if the query contains the words 'music' or 'radio' these will not be included in the mediaName field. If the query contains just these words, e.g., "Play music in <my app>", the field will be <null> and the INPlayMediaIntent will effectively contain no content whatsoever.

Given the content that app provides, knowing whether the terms 'music' and 'radio' were used are absolutely necessary for sensibly resolving the query. Can anyone provide guidance on how I can get these terms to be visible within the INPlayMediaIntent object?

Answer 1

The words 'music' and 'radio' seem to almost never appear in the mediaName field, but their presence in the Siri query is usually reflected in the mediaType field. This looks like a Int but actually corresponds to the INMediaItemType enum listed here. It seems that the two values I was seeing (16 and 18) correspond to .radioStation and .music respectively (why .music and not .musicStation, I don't know).

Mostly, between the mediaType and mediaName I was able to code meaningful ways to resolve most queries.

Still some queries were intractable. "music radio" gets the mediaType .radioStation and an empty field for mediaName and so the query passed to my IntentsExtention has no way of knowing the user asked for music.