siri won't play my podcasts

I fixed this by going into the Home App, tapping the navigation icon in the upper left hand corner of the main page, tapping on my name under people, turning off personal requests, and turning them back on. Podcasts started playing again.

Have you tried specifying a particular podcast? I've only done it a few times, with the Planet Money podcast from NPR. They're numbered, but when I tried, "Hey Siri, play Planet Money number 123" the reply was "I can't do that." However, when I said, "Hey Siri, play Planet Money podcast on 'insert title here'" it worked. So being more specific helps, I think. Siri doesn't seem able (with podcasts at any rate) to take the general command as well as can be done with music...

Hi,

I had the same problem and called Apple for support. What it turned out to be in my case is that even though I had unplayed podcasts on my phone and my Macbook, there was an issue with iCloud syncing. It seems that the list that Siri uses on the Homepod is the iCloud synced podcasts, and if your podcasts are not synced correctly to iCloud Siri doesn't know about them. To be honest it is not exactly clear to me which of the things we tried got syncing going again, but it seems like some combination of logging out of iCloud, setting podcasts not to sync and then setting them back to sync, and forcing downloads of podcasts to my Macbook got things going again. Apple support was able to look at my list of podcasts in iCloud and we could see when a podcast was synced, and as soon as it was visible in iCloud I was able to play it with Siri on my Homepod.

Hope this helps!

I have the same issue and I assume it has something to do with using separate accounts for iCloud and iTunes. I think the HomePod uses my iTunes account for Apple Music but Podcast are synced via my iCloud account. It’s very frustrating. Podcasts are the main reason I bought my HomePods. I called AppleCare on day one but they couldn’t help.

I'm having a similar issue. When I ask HomePod siri to play podcasts it tells me I'm not subscribed to any podcasts.

I am subscribed to various podcasts and they sync between my various apple devices.