"Hey Siri" no bueno...on MacBook Pro

[Archon Prime]

Well this is an odd one.
Customer is legally blind. has a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015), 2.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5,
with all the accessibility and dictation settings enabled on his machine. He liked to show off all the bells and whistles he's been using on it over the last several years, and LOVED that the "hey siri" option came native to 10.15.

He wanted a clean install done and installed 10.15.5 on it again. So I did the disk erase, and the install of the latest version, yadda yadda.

Install was fine, we restored the files he wanted from the time machine backup (documents and a few photos). So the next step was to go into system preferences and enable the accessibility. features and siri settings again with the hey siri option.....which is no longer showing up. At all. As if it never existed in the first place. I SAW the setting before we did the nuke and pave.

Here is 10.15.5 on my macbook for Hey siri settings:



And here is his:



So...what the hell is going on? lol All settings are the exact same (I took screen shots of all the accessibility, siri and zoom settings, etc before the install.
Now, the only thing that was different from the previous install. was that he wanted to enable FileVault on the machine this time around. Other than that, it's the only difference.

Anyone else come across this or have ideas? I even blew away the com.apple.systemprefs.plist

 

[sapphirescales]

I'd stay far away from Catalina if I were you. I've had nothing but problems with that buggy POS OS. I just bought a 2020 MacBook Air for personal use and the thing is acting weird (freezes, slow-downs, crashes, etc.). I suspect Catalina rather than a hardware problem. I'm going to try to do a fresh install of Mojave but I don't think it supports it.

 

[overburnz]

“Hey Siri” is not available on all MacBooks

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT209014

 

[Computer Bloke]

There's a simple but non-obvious workaround. Go to System Preferences, Accessibility, Voice Control and then select "Enable Voice Control" if this hasn't been done already. You should now be able to use the command "Open Siri" (or a few others) in place of "Hey Siri" and all will be muy bueno.

I've just tested this on an "unsupported" Early 2013 MacBook Air with Catalina (10.15.5) and it works perfectly.

And if that doesn't work there's also the "hold Command-Space" shortcut to launch Siri; not as cool, but functional.

 

[Archon Prime]

“Hey Siri” is not available on all MacBooks

https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT209014

Yeah i saw that and laughed...I have the same 2015 macbook as this client. has those settings in mine. This was on his prior to the reinstall.