How to Scroll TikTok Hands-Free on Your iPhone or iPad with Simple Voice Commands

If you can’t curb your TikTok obsession, at least make it more effective by taking your hands out of the equation. So whether you’re eating breakfast, working at your computer, or using your hands for another non-TikTok task, you don’t even have to touch your iPhone or iPad to scroll through all those videos in your feed. Instead, you can just tell him what to do and he will listen.

This TikTok hack was made possible by voice control, a hidden accessibility feature in iOS and iPadOS that targets users who find it difficult to physically interact with their devices. Some of its built-in voice commands are for scrolling and swiping up and down – perfect for browsing TikTok.

To make it work, all you have to do is enable voice control and say the right commands to watch TikTok videos without lifting a finger. Hands-free browsing of TikTok is most enjoyable when you have a docking station, stand, or folio to keep your device upright for comfortable viewing, but this is not required. If you can see the screen of your iPhone or iPad, that’s enough, right?

View voice commands

Launch the Settings app and go to Accessibility -> Voice Control -> Customize Commands. You’ll find hundreds of existing voice commands here, and you can use a couple of them to scroll through TikTok videos. To find them, tap “Basic Gestures”.

There are a few basic gestures here that you can use to navigate your TikTok home feed, so use the ones that work best for you.

First, there are “scroll down”and “scroll up”, which move you up or down the current page. Since TikTok has fixed pages for each video, saying “scroll down”is the same as swiping up on the screen to open the next video. Similarly, “swipe up”will take you back to the previous one, just like a small swipe down the screen will do.

Second, “swipe up”and “swipe down”to move up or down the current page. Again, since TikTok has fixed pages for each video, these voice commands are the same as manually swiping up or down the TikTok feed with your finger to go to the next or previous video.

If you go to the voice command settings, you have the option to ask for confirmation. This means that your iPhone or iPad will ask you to confirm the action after saying the voice command. This setting will slow down TikTok browsing, so leave it disabled for faster scrolling.

Turn on voice control

If you don’t already have voice control enabled, you can quickly turn it on in a variety of ways:

• Go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Voice Control, then turn on the Voice Control toggle.
• Ask Siri to “turn on voice control.”(Press and hold the side button, home button, or top button to activate Siri, or say “Hey Siri”if you have it enabled.)
• Set up an accessibility shortcut. Go to “Settings”-> “Accessibility”-> “Ease of Access Shortcut”, then check the “Voice control”box. After that, every time you press the Side, Home, or Top button three times, the voice control will turn on or off. If multiple accessibility options are assigned to the shortcut, you will need to select “Voice Control”from the action menu after triple-clicking.
• If you like the accessibility shortcut, you can add the accessibility shortcuts control to the Control Center. Then open the Control Center, tap the control and select Voice Control.

A blue microphone icon will appear in the status bar, indicating that your iPhone or iPad is now actively listening for commands.

Swipe TikTok Hands Free

Now it’s time to test the voice commands on TikTok. You can open TikTok like you normally would or say “open TikTok”to have voice control open it for you. In the home feed, say “scroll down”or “swipe up”to go to the next video, or “scroll up”or “swipe down”to go back to the previous video.

TikTok videos are fixed in place and take up the entire page (unlike Instagram), so when you use any command, you will see a completely different video, either above or below the one you just watched.

A confirmation alert will appear at the top of the screen after saying the voice command, which will tell you that it worked. If this annoys you, you can go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Voice Control and then turn off the “Show Confirmation”toggle.

Use more voice commands on TikTok

You can say more to manage TikTok if you are interested. For example, if you want to like a TikTok video with just your voice, say “double tap”and Voice Control will simulate double tapping the middle of the screen, liking the video you’re watching. However, by saying the same thing, like is not canceled.

You can also use the following voice commands and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Go back to Accessibility -> Voice Control -> Customize Commands to view all the voice control gestures you can use. You can even create a custom command if you need to do something specific or just say something different from the pre-programmed commands (see next section below).

• One touch to pause or play a video clip.
• Swipe left to view the user’s profile.
• Swipe right to return to the user’s profile video.
• “Tap share to open the share menu (and swipe down to close it).
• “Volume up”to better hear the sound of the video.
• “Volume down”to make the sound too loud.
• “Long press”to open a menu to save the video, add it to favorites, etc. (and “swipe down”to close it).
• “Show Numbers”to overlay numbers next to the buttons you can use so you can say something like “press 5″to open the comments.
• “Show Names”to temporarily overlay names next to active buttons so you can say something like “click button”to open comments.

“Press comment”used to open comments on videos, but it no longer works for us because the TikTok comment button now appears to be a “button”according to the “show names”command.

Create Custom TikTok Teams (Optional)

If “scroll down”or “scroll up”is too hard every time you want to watch the next TikTok video in the feed, you can change it to something else like “next”or “next video”.

Go back to Accessibility -> Voice Control -> Customize Commands, click Custom, then Create New Command. Type the phrase you want to say into the text field, then click Action to assign it a gesture. Click Perform Custom Gesture, then record the gesture and click Save. For example, if I want “Next”to go to the next video, I can swipe up once when creating the gesture and save it.

After you click Save, click New Command to return. You can restrict the new voice command to TikTok only so that it doesn’t do anything else on any other app. Tap Application, select TikTok instead of Any, press Back, then select Save to add a new voice command to your arsenal.

Disable voice control

Unfortunately, there’s one thing about voice control that it’s always listening for, so it’s easy for you or someone else to accidentally trigger a voice command that does something unexpected on your iPhone or iPad. You probably only need to turn on voice control while browsing TikTok so you can quickly turn it off once you’re done. The best way to disable voice control is to use voice control itself:

• Say “turn off voice control”then say “click Verify”or manually click Verify when prompted.

The blue microphone icon will no longer appear in the status bar.

But you also have the traditional ways, opposite of those in step 2 above:

• Go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Voice Control, then turn off Voice Control.
• Ask Siri to “turn off voice control.”(Press and hold the side button, home button, or top button to activate Siri, or say “Hey Siri”if you have it enabled.)
• If you set it as an accessibility shortcut, triple-click the side button, home button, or top button to turn voice control on or off. If the shortcut has multiple accessibility options, select “Voice Control”from the action menu after triple-clicking.
• If you’ve added an Accessibility Shortcuts control to Control Center, open Control Center, tap the control, and select Voice Control to deselect it.

Needless to say, we don’t recommend TikTok with voice control on your iPhone while you’re driving. It might be tempting to have your iPhone on a car mount, but don’t!