One of the features added in iOS 12 was the ability for apps to have tighter integration with Siri. This means that you can use third-party apps right in Siri, and get rich feedback from them. I was never a big user of Siri, however the new changes allowed me to use the third-party apps I love in Siri.
An app that was one of the first to integrate with Siri was Carrot Weather. It allows you to quickly ask Siri for the weather, and get a detailed reply, and a rich preview of the weather. This can all be done without unlocking your phone, and all the fields can be customised. You can also request Carrot to bring up a summary for a certain data points, such as rain or cloud cover.
Carrot Weather allows you to set up 17 types of Shortcuts. These include the main ones, which are current weather, extended forecast (a forecast for the whole week), rain report and interact. However, you can also add data points such as visibility and wind speed, and there are 13 options for these. You can add your own custom voice command for these, just like any other shortcut, and they also give you a rich preview. The information in the slots on the rich preview also change depending on what data point you use – for example, below, the weather is in the data slot in the rich preview forecast.
The rich previews in Siri are also very customisable. You can customise each data point to what you want it to be – for example, I switched the fourth data slot from location to sunrise and sunset times, as I know where I am and I want useful information. The rich previews also allow you to see visually how much it is going to rain, with a bar graph that shows you roughly how heavily it will rain. This is great if you want to quickly check if it’s going to rain heavily in the next hour.
Carrot Weather’s Shortcuts can also be used in the Shortcuts app. I use it in my morning routine Shortcut, which can be found in this post. You can use the other data points too, so you could get a rain report in your morning Shortcut if you wanted to.
Carrot Weather is a great app – it is always updated to take advantage of the newest features of iOS, and it’s a fun way to find out what the weather will be like. Plus, it’s very customisable and has the best UI of any weather app I have used. I’ve written about it multiple times on the site, and I can’t recommend it more.
Carrot Weather is £4.99 on the App Store.