--- title: "Siri Actions: ask your iOS app what's on this weekend" description: "Siri Actions will answer three questions about your app's events: what's on today, what's coming up, and what's on this weekend. The events come from the ones a" canonical_url: "https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/siri-actions-ask-your-ios-app-what-s-on-this-weekend-a1649/" lang: en date: 2026-11-03 last_updated: 2026-11-03 --- # Siri Actions: ask your iOS app what's on this weekend Three new questions about your app's events ![](https://blog.goodbarber.com/_public/profile/1a/1a58984fe517bfe26adb13887776f7dfdcd64c1d-default.jpg) [João Aleixo](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/author/joao-aleixo/)Employee at GoodBarber [Select **GoodBarber** as yourPreferred news sourceSelect **GoodBarber** as your](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=goodbarber.com) Nov 3, 2026 · 9 min read ![](https://cmsphoto.ww-cdn.com/superstatic/41269/art/grande/98461839-68666811.jpg?v=1792687605.8411705) ## What your audience will be able to ask Three questions, each with its own wordings. "What's on today on [your app]", "What's happening today on [your app]", "What's on tonight on [your app]", "What's on now on [your app]". "Upcoming events on [your app]", "What's coming up on [your app]". "What's on this weekend on [your app]", "What's the programme this weekend on [your app]". Every phrase ends with your app's name, which is what tells Siri to ask your app rather than answer from the iPhone's own calendar. Siri answers out loud and shows a card listing the events, each with its title, image and date. On iOS 26 and later the rows are live, so tapping an event opens it in your app; on earlier versions the same card is a picture. Either way it follows the phone's light or dark appearance. Today's answer starts with what is already running and then what is still to come: "On now: Market, until 18:00 today. Later today: Concert at 20:00. And 2 more." The coming-up answer counts them: "5 events coming up. The first is Open Day, tomorrow at 10:00." The weekend answer covers the whole weekend: "2 events this weekend. The first is Jazz Night, Friday 16 October at 20:00." Times and dates follow the reader's own region, so the same answer on an American phone reads 8:00 PM. These sit alongside the questions [already in Siri Actions](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/siri-actions-ask-your-goodbarber-ios-app-for-its-latest-article-or-video-a1630/), built on the same App Intents framework. How you get them is different, and that is the last section of this post. ## Where the events come from From the Events widgets on your app's home page. The same place "What's new" reads, and each widget contributes as many events as it shows. Events already over are left out. There is no setting for any of this. There is one thing to check: your events have to appear on an Events widget on your home page. If yours live in a section the home page does not show, Siri will answer that your app has no events, and putting an Events widget on the home page is the whole fix. Which matters more than it did a month ago, because the calendar now fills itself. Events arriving from [Ticketmaster](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/your-ticketmaster-events-now-fill-your-app-s-calendar-on-their-own-a1641/), from [HelloAsso](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/your-helloasso-events-memberships-and-donations-now-show-up-in-your-app-a1646/) and from [Church Center](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/your-church-center-events-now-fill-your-church-app-s-calendar-on-their-own-a1647/) land in your app on their own. Put one of those widgets on your home page and the ticketing platform fills the calendar for you, and Siri reads from it. It reaches your app the way every engine capability does. One [native iOS engine](https://www.goodbarber.com/native/technology/) compiles every GoodBarber iOS app, so a question built there arrives in a build rather than as something you install. An event reserved for subscribers is named like the rest, with a lock before its title on the card, as in your app. Opening it still requires the subscription. And if your home page sits behind a login, a visitor who is not signed in gets no events from it, while a signed-in member does. ## How Siri decides what is "on" What is running right now comes first, the one ending soonest before the rest. That ordering is the whole reason "what's on now" is useful at 19:00 on a Friday. The harder part was being honest about what the data actually knows. An event with no end time that started this morning is never called "on now", because nobody told us it is still going; it is listed after the others. An all-day event is "today, all day". An event whose end carries a date but no hour is "ending today" on its last day, and never an invented hour. Dates are spoken the way a person would say them: "today at 20:00", "tomorrow at 10:00", or a full date once it is past tomorrow, "Saturday 17 October at 20:00", with the year added only when it is not this one. An event already under way is spoken by when it ends instead of when it began. The weekend window opens at 18:00 on the evening before the calendar's weekend, and which evening that is comes from the phone's region: Friday where the weekend is Saturday and Sunday, Thursday where it is Friday and Saturday. The concert that evening counts as a weekend event; the lunchtime one the same day does not. We had to pick an hour, and this one keeps the evening in and the lunch out. ## What it will not do It never asks you to choose and it never dead-ends. An empty window names the next event there is: "Nothing is planned this weekend on [your app]. The next event is …". Nothing at all is one clear sentence over a card reading "No events to show.", and an app with no Events widget on its home page says it has no events rather than pretending to look. There is no "this week", no "tomorrow" and no "next month", and you cannot ask Siri to add an event to your calendar. [When Siri Actions launched in September](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/siri-actions-the-mcp-of-your-ios-app-a1616/) we said events had two natural questions, this weekend and what's on near me. This is the first. Place is the half we have not shipped, and a question about what is on near you needs more than a phrase. ## Why three questions and not ten We wrote down 32 questions people might ask about events and scored each one on value, how reliably Siri could hear it, whether the data supports it and what it would cost to build. Then we had the list argued against. A short list survived, and we kept it that small on purpose, because App Shortcut entries are permanent once shipped. Their names and their order can never change, and an app has only ten. How that short list became exactly three was decided on a device. The first version was one question with a slot, so you could say today or this week or this weekend and Siri would fill in the rest. On an iPhone running iOS 27 it failed twice. Siri left the word "today" out of the slot entirely and answered as though no window had been named. Then "this weekend" came back as "this week". So we removed the slot. Each question became its own intent with the words written into fixed phrases, and "this week" was dropped rather than shipped unreliable. Fixed phrases reached the right answer every time. That is not the opposite of how the latest-article question works, though it looks like it. A section name is a word you chose, so a mishearing is visible: Siri does not recognise it, asks which section you meant, and shows the list. The time window failed in a way nothing could catch. Siri did not fail to recognise the value, it picked a different valid one, and the answer for the wrong week looked perfectly confident. For the same reason "What's next on [your app]" was cut for sounding too close to "What's new on [your app]", and one phrase was reworded. ## How it reaches your app App Shortcuts are compiled into the binary rather than switched on remotely, so Siri learns an app's phrases at install time from data baked into the build. The practical consequence is that these questions arrive with a store update, not overnight. A podcast question is on its way as well, the one we said was next in October. What has been checked, and what has not. Every phrase, every empty state and every tap was tested by speaking to an iPhone 18 Pro on iOS 27 in our own app. A real client app generated by the production pipeline with the feature on was then inspected and installed on a device: six Siri entries in the app, the three new event questions alongside what's new, the latest article and the latest episodes, out of the ten an app can have. Every language trained, builds on Xcode 26 and 27, and an independent review of every change. Not checked: a device on iOS 26 or earlier. The live card on iOS 26 and later was tested; the static card on earlier versions is the claim still waiting on a device. One thing we would like back from you: the phrases your audience actually uses. "What's on tonight" was our guess, and this is the last moment the wording is soft, because once these entries ship their names and their order are permanent. You can hear Siri Actions today. Install [GoodBarber News](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodbarber-news/id665149365) and ask "What's the latest article on GB News?". GB News is the name on the home screen, and the name Siri listens for. If you do not have an app yet, [start a free trial](https://www.goodbarber.com/create/templates/) and build a first version. ## Frequently asked questions about Siri events **Do I have to set anything up for Siri to answer about my events?** No. The answers are built from the Events widgets already on your app's home page, and there is no switch anywhere in the back-office. The questions are compiled into the app, so they arrive with a store update. **Which events does Siri know about?** Those shown by the Events widgets on your home page, as many as each widget shows, minus the ones already over. The coming-up question reads the next five of them; today and the weekend read the whole window. An app whose events live in a section with no widget on the home page will answer that it has no events. **Does Siri read out content my subscribers pay for?** No. It names a subscriber-only event the way your app lists it, with a lock before the title, and opening it still requires the subscription. The answer gives the title, the image and the date, never the content itself. **Why can't my audience ask what's on this week?** We tried it and dropped it. On a device, "this weekend" kept coming back as "this week", so rather than answer the wrong window we cut the question. **What about tomorrow, or next month?** Those were never built. App Shortcut entries are permanent once shipped and an app has only ten, so we kept the set small and took the three questions we could stand behind. **Does this work on Android?** No. Siri and App Intents are Apple technologies, so this is iOS only. Your Android app is unchanged. **What is the difference between this and "What's new"?** They read different things. "What's new" gives an overview of the content on your home page; the events questions read the dates: what is running now, what starts later, what fills the weekend. Both answer out loud, from the same home page. One thing changed in "What's new" along the way: when the server has nothing new to send, it now says so instead of reading back what it said last time. Follow GoodBarber on Google [![Add as a preferred source on Google](https://portal.ww-cdn.com/portal_static/images/preferred-source/badge-en.172e670ec003.png)](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=goodbarber.com) ![](https://blog.goodbarber.com/_public/profile/1a/1a58984fe517bfe26adb13887776f7dfdcd64c1d-default.jpg) About the author João Aleixo Employee at GoodBarber I'm an iOS Engineer at GoodBarber. I work on the native iOS engine at the heart of the platform, the codebase that turns what our users build into real apps on the App Store. GoodBarber apps are downloaded once every 4 seconds across both stores, so every change we make ships to a lot of people at once. Swift mostly, Objective-C when the codebase insists. Lately I've also been building AI tooling that generates native code from our component docs. I came to software from physics and joined GoodBarber in 2020. Since then I've cared most about the things that keep a codebase healthy at that scale: solid architecture, good tests, and no surprises in production. Here, I write about iOS development, what it takes to build a platform with paying customers in 152 countries, and how AI is changing the way we make them. Outside work I'm a chronic tinkerer: building a 2D RTS in Godot, running too many services on a homelab, poking at Wi-Fi with a Raspberry Pi, and setting up my own AI agents with OpenClaw to see how much of my life I can automate. [More from João](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/author/joao-aleixo/)[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalxp/)