![4. Speech Recognition—and Siri – iPhone: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition [Book]](https://www.todaysauthormagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1200w630h.png "4. Speech Recognition—and Siri – iPhone: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition [Book]")
Opening apps. If you don’t learn to use Siri for anything
else, for the love of Mike, learn this one.
You can say, “Open Calendar” or “Play Angry Birds” or
“Launch Calculator.”
Result: The
corresponding app opens instantly. It’s exactly the same as
pressing the Home button, swiping across the screen until you
find the app you’re looking for, and then tapping its icon—but
without pressing the Home button, swiping across the screen
until you find the app you’re looking for, and then tapping its
icon.
Change your
settings. This one’s new in iOS 7, and it’s excellent. You
can make changes to certain basic settings just by speaking your
request. You can say, for example, “Turn on Bluetooth,” “Turn
off WiFi,” “Turn on Do Not Disturb,” and “Turn on Airplane
mode.” (You can’t turn off
Airplane mode by voice, because Siri doesn’t work without an Internet
connection.)
You can also make screen adjustments: “Make the screen
brighter.” “Dim the screen.”
Open Settings
panels. When you need to make tweakier changes to
Settings, you can open the most important panels by voice. “Open WiFi settings,” “Open Cellular
settings,” “Open Personal Hotspot settings,” “Open Notification
settings,” “Open Sounds settings,” “Open wallpaper settings,”
and so on.
You can open your apps’ settings this way, too: “Open Maps
settings,” “Open Netflix settings,” “Open Delta settings,” and
so on.
Result: Siri silently
opens the corresponding page of Settings.
Calling. Siri can place
phone calls or FaceTime calls for you. “Call Harold.” “Call
Nicole on her mobile phone.” “Call the office.” “Phone home.”
“Dial 512-444-1212.” “Start a FaceTime call with Sheila
Withins.” “FaceTime Alex.”
Result: Siri hands you
off to the Phone or FaceTime app and places the call. At this
point, it’s just as though you’d initiated the call
yourself.
In iOS 7, Siri also responds to questions about your
voicemail, like “Do I have any new voicemail
messages?” and even “Play my voicemails.” (After playing each
message, Siri gracefully offers to let you return the call—or to
“play the next one.”)
Alarms. You can say, “Wake
me up at 7:35.” “Change my 7:35 alarm to 8:00.” “Wake me up in 6 hours.” “Cancel my 6 a.m. alarm”
(or “Delete my…” or “Turn off my…”).
This is so much quicker
than setting the iPhone’s alarm the usual way.
Result: When you set or
change an alarm, you get a sleek digital alarm clock, right there beneath Siri’s response. And Siri speaks to confirm what she understood.
Timer. You can also control the Timer module of the phone’s Clock app.
It’s like a stopwatch in reverse, in that it counts down to
zero—handy when you’re baking something, limiting your kid’s
video-game time, and so on. For example: “Set the timer for 20
minutes.” Or “Show the timer,” “Pause the timer,” “Resume,”
“Reset the timer,” and “Stop it.”
Result: A cool digital
timer appears.
Tip
In iOS 7, you can specify minutes and seconds: “Set the time for two
minutes, thirty seconds,” for example.
Result: When you ask
about the time, you see the clock identifying the time in
question. (For dates, Siri just talks to you and writes out the
date.)
Contacts. You can ask Siri to look up information in your address book
(the Contacts app)—and not just addresses. For example, you can
say, “What’s Gary’s work number?” “Give me Sheila Jenkins’s
office phone.” “Show Tia’s home email address.” “What’s my
boss’s home address?” “When is my husband’s birthday?” “Show
Larry Murgatroid.” “Find everybody named Smith.” “Who is P.J.
Frankenberg?”
Result: A half “page”
from your Contacts list. You can tap it to jump into that
person’s full card in Contacts. (If Siri finds multiple listings
for the person you named—“Bob,” for example—she lists all the
matches and asks you to specify which one you meant.)
Tip
In many of the examples on these pages, you’ll see that
you can identify people by their relationship to you. You can
say, “Show my mom’s work number,” for example, or “Give me
directions to my boss’s house,” or “Call my girlfriend.” For
details on teaching Siri about these relationships, see Advanced Siri at the end of this chapter.
Result: You see a
miniature outgoing text message. Siri asks if you want to send it; say “Yes,”
“Send,” or “Confirm” to proceed.
Tip
If you’re using earbuds, headphones, or a Bluetooth
speaker, Siri reads the message back to you before asking
if you want to send it. (You can ask her to read it again by
saying something like, “Review that,” “Read it again,” or
“Read it back to me.”) The idea, of course, is that if you’re
wearing earbuds or using Bluetooth, you might be driving, so
you should keep your eyes on the road.
If you need to edit the message before sending it, you
have a couple of options. First, you can tap it; Siri hands you
off to the Messages app for editing and sending.
Second, you can edit it by voice. You can say, “Change it to” to re-dictate
the message; “Add” to add more to the message; “No, send it to
Frank” to change the recipient; “No” to leave the message on the
screen without sending it; or “Cancel” to forget the whole
thing.
You can also ask Siri to read incoming text messages to you, which is great if you’re
driving. For example, you can say, “Read my new messages,” and
“Read that again.”
Tip
If you’ve opted to conceal the actual contents of
incoming texts so that they don’t appear on your screen (Capturing Messages and Files), then Siri can read you only the senders’ names or
numbers—not the messages themselves.
You can even have her reply to messages she’s just read to
you. “Reply, ‘Congratulations (period). Can’t wait to see your
trophy (exclamation point)!’ ” “Call her back.” “Tell him I have
a flat tire and I’m going to be late.”
For example, if you say, “Read my latest email” or “Read
my new email,” Siri reads aloud your most recent email message.
(Siri then offers you the chance to dictate a response.)
Or you can use the new summary-listing commands. When you
say, “Read my email,” Siri starts walking backwards through your
Inbox, telling you the subject of each, plus who sent it and
when.
While this recitation is going on, you can tap the
microphone button to interrupt with, “Read that email” or “Read
the third email” (for example)—and Siri will read a summary of
the email (not the whole body).
She once again invites you to dictate a reply; if you say
no, she picks up from where she left off, reading the rest of
the subjects.
Tip
You can also use the pre-iOS 7 comands like, “Any new
mail from Chris today?” “Show new mail about the world
premiere.” “Show yesterday’s email from Jan.” All of those
commands produce a list of the messages, but Siri doesn’t read
them.
(If you’ve indicated only the subject and addressee,
Siri prompts you for the body of the
message.)
Tip
You can’t send mail to canned groups of people using
Siri—at least not without MailShot, an iPhone
app that exists expressly for the purpose of letting you
create email addressee groups.
You can reply to a message Siri has just described, too.
“Reply, ‘Dear Robin (comma), I’m so sorry about your dog
(period). I’ll be more careful next time (period).” “Call her
mobile number.” “Send him a text message saying, ‘I got your
note.’ ”
Result: A miniature
Mail message, showing you Siri’s handiwork before you send
it.
Calendar. Siri can make appointments for you. Considering how many tedious
finger taps it usually takes to schedule an appointment in the
Calendar app, this is an enormous improvement. “Make an
appointment with Patrick for Thursday at 3 p.m.” “Set up a
haircut at nine.” “Set up a meeting with Charlize this Friday at
noon.” “Meet Danny Cooper at six.” “New appointment with Steve,
next Sunday at seven.” “Schedule a conference call at 5:30 p.m.
tonight in my office.”
Result: A slice of that
day’s calendar appears, filled in the way you
requested.
You can also move previously scheduled meetings by
voice. For example, “Move my 2:00 meeting to
2:30.” “Reschedule my meeting with Charlize to a week from
Monday at noon.” “Add Frank to my meeting with Harry.” “Cancel
the conference call on Sunday.”
You can even consult
your calendar by voice. You can say, “What’s on my calendar
today?” “What’s on my calendar for September 23?” “When’s my
next appointment?” “When is my meeting with Charlize?” “Where is
my next meeting?”
Result: Siri reads you your agenda and displays a tidy Day
view of the specified date.
Directions. By consulting
the phone’s GPS, Siri can set up the Maps app to answer requests
like these: “How do I get to the airport?” “Show me 1500
Broadway, New York City.” “Directions to my assistant’s house.”
“Take me home.” “What’s my next turn?” “Are we there
yet?”
Tip
You can also say, “Stop navigation”—a great way to make
Maps stop harassing you when you realize you know where you
are.
You can ask for directions to the home or work address of
anyone in your Contacts list—provided those addresses are
in your Contacts
cards.
Result: Siri fires up
the Maps app, with the start and end points of your driving directions already filled in.
Reminders. Siri is a natural match for the Reminders app.
She can add items to that list at your spoken command. For
example: “Remind me to file my IRS tax extension.” “Remind me to
bring the science supplies to school.” “Remind me to take my
antibiotic tomorrow at 7 a.m.”
The location-based
reminders are especially amazing. They rely on GPS to know where
you are. So you can say, “Remind me to visit the drugstore when
I leave the office.” “Remind me to water the lawn when I get
home.” “Remind me to check in with Nancy when I leave
here.”
Result: A miniature
entry from the Reminders app, showing you that Siri has understood.
But you can also call up a certain note to the screen,
like this: “Find my frequent-flyer note.” You can even summon a
table-of-contents view of all your notes by saying, “Show all my
notes.”
Result: A miniature
Notes page appears, showing your newly dictated text (or the
existing note that you’ve requested).
Tip
You can keep dictating into the note you’ve just added.
Say, “Add ‘Return books to library’ ” (or just say, “Add,” and
she’ll ask you what to add). She’ll keep adding to the same
note until you say, “Note that…” or “Start a note” or “Take a
note” to begin a fresh note page.
You can add text to an earlier Note: “Add
Titanic II: The Voyage Home to my ‘Movies
to Rent’ note.” (The first line of any note is also its
title—in this case, “Movies to Rent.”)
Businesses. Siri is a walking (well, all right, non-walking)
Yellow Pages. Go ahead, try it: “Find coffee near me.” “Where’s
the closest Walmart?” “Find some pizza places in Cincinnati.”
“Search for gas stations.” “French restaurants
nearby.” “I’m in the mood for Chinese food.” “Find me a
hospital.” “I want to buy a book.”
Result: Siri displays a handsome list of businesses nearby
that match your request.
Tip
She’s a sly dog, that Siri. She’ll help you out even if
your requests are, ahem, somewhat off the straight and narrow.
If you say, “I think I’m drunk,” she’ll list nearby cab
companies. If you indicate that you’re craving relief from
your drug addiction, she’ll provide you with a list of rehab
centers. If you refer to certain biological urges, she’ll list
escort services.
But she’s ready to do more than just give you information.
She can actually book your reservations, thanks to her
integration with the Open Table Web site. You can say, “Table
for two in Belmont tonight,” or “Make a reservation at an
inexpensive Mexican restaurant Saturday night at seven.”
Result: Siri complies
by showing you the proposed reservation (facing page, right).
Tap one of the offered alternative time slots, if you like, and
then off you go. Everything else is tappable here, too—the
ratings (tap to read customer reviews), phone number, Web
address, map, and so on.
Music. Instead of fumbling around in your Music app,
save yourself steps and time by speaking the name of the album,
song, or band: “Play some Beatles.” “Play ‘I’m a Barbie Girl.’ ”
“Play some jazz.” “Play my jogging playlist.” “Play the party
mix.” “Shuffle my ‘Dave’s Faves’ playlist.” “Play.” “Pause.”
“Resume.” “Skip.”
If you’ve set up any iTunes Radio stations (Chapter 6), you can call for them by name,
too: “Play Dolly Parton Radio.” Or be more generic: Just say
“Play iTunes Radio” and be surprised. Or be more specific: Say
“Play some country music” (substitute your favorite genre).
Result: A convenient
miniature Weather display for the date and place you
specified.
Stocks. “What’s Google’s
stock price?” “What did Ford close at today?” “How’s the Dow
doing?” “What’s Microsoft’s P/E ratio?” “What’s Amazon’s average
volume?” “How are the markets doing?”
Result: A tidy little
stock graph, bearing a wealth of up-to-date
statistics.
Search the Web. “Search the
Web for a 2014 Ford Mustang.” “Search for healthy smoothie
recipes.” “Search Wikipedia for the Thunderbirds.” “Search for
news about the Netflix-Amazon merger.”
Tip
In iOS 7, Siri uses Microsoft’s Bing search service to
perform its Web searches. If you prefer Google, just say so.
Say, “Google Benjamin Franklin.” (For that matter, you can
also ask Siri to “Yahoo” something—or example, “Yahoo low-cal
dessert recipes.”)
Wikipedia is a search type all its own. “Search Wikipedia
for Harold Edgerton.” “Look up Mariah Carey on Wikipedia.”
Pictures get special treatment, too: “I want to see pictures of
cows.” (You can also say, “Show me pictures of…” or “Find me…”
or “Search for…” but weirdly enough, those forms require you to
confirm that you do, in fact, want to search the Web before
Siri actually does it.)
You can also ask questions about individual players, like,
“Who has the best batting average?” “Who has scored the most
runs against the Red Sox?” “Who has scored the most goals in
British soccer? “Which quarterback had the most sacks last
year?”
And, of course, team stats are fair game, like, “Show me
the roster for the Giants,” “Who is pitching for Tampa this
season?” and “Is anyone on the Marlins injured right
now?”
Movies. Siri is also the virtual equivalent of an
insufferable film buff. She knows everything. “Who was the star of
Groundhog Day?” “Who directed
Chinatown?” “What is
Waterworld rated?” “What movie won Best
Picture in 1952?”
It’s not just about old movies, either. Siri also knows everything about current showtimes
in theaters. “What movies are opening this week?” “What’s
playing at the Watton Cineplex?” “Give me the reviews for
Titanic 2: The Return.” “What are today’s
showtimes for Monsters University?”
Result: Tidy tables of
movie theaters or movie showtimes, displayed on a faux movie
marquee. (Tap one for details.) Sometimes you get a movie poster
filled with facts—and, of course, a link to rent or buy it on
iTunes.
Facts and figures. This is
a huge category. It represents Siri’s partnership with the
Wolfram Alpha factual search engine (www.wolframalpha.com).
The possibilities here could fill an entire chapter—or an entire
encyclopedia.
You can say things like, “How many days until Valentine’s
Day?” “When was Abraham Lincoln born?” “How many teaspoons are
in a gallon?” “What’s the exchange rate between dollars and
euros?” “What’s the capital of Belgium?” “How many calories are
in a Hershey bar?” “What’s a 17 percent tip on sixty-two dollars
for three people?” “What movie won the Oscar for Best Picture in
1985?” “When is the next solar eclipse?” “Show me the Big
Dipper.” “What’s the tallest mountain in the world?” “What’s the
price of gold right now?” “What’s the definition of
‘schadenfreude’?” “How much is 23 dollars in pesos?” “Generate a
random number.” “Graph x equals 3y plus 12.” “What flights are
overhead?”
Result: A specially
formatted table, ripped right out of Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge base.
Post to Twitter or
Facebook. iOS is a red-blooded, full-blown Twitter
companion. So you can say things like, “Tweet, ‘I just saw
three-headed dog catch a Frisbee in midair. Unreal.’ ” “Tweet
with my location, ‘My car just broke down somewhere in Detroit.
Help?’ ”
Facebook is fair game, too. You can say, “Post to
Facebook, ‘The guy next to me kept his cellphone on for the
whole plane ride,’ ” or “Write on my wall, ‘I can’t believe I
ate the whole thing.’ ”
Result: Siri offers you a sheet (miniature dialog box)
where you can approve the transcription and then, if it all
looks good, send it off to your Twitter or Facebook feed.
Or ask, “What are people saying about the Chicago Bears?”
to read tweets on that subject. Or, conversely, you can ask,
“What does Ashton Kutcher say?” to see his most recent tweets.
(You can substitute the names of other people or companies on
Twitter.) Or, “Search Twitter for the hashtag
‘FirstWorldProblems.’ ” (A hashtag is a searchable phrase like
#toofunny or #iphone7, which makes finding relevant tweets on
Twitter much easier.)
