Systems and processes for operating an intelligent automated assistant to perform intelligent list reading are provided. In one example process, a spoken user request associated with a plurality of data items is received. The process determines whether a degree of specificity of the spoken user request is less than a threshold level. In response to determining that a degree of specificity of the spoken user request is less than a threshold level, one or more attributes related to the spoken user request are determined. The one or more attributes are not defined in the spoken user request. Additionally, a list of data items based on the spoken user request and the one or more attributes is obtained. A spoken response comprising a subset of the list of data items is generated and the spoken response is provided.