Peace of Mind Organizing

App of the week: Siri

18 May 2012

I love Siri, the intelligent voice-recognition software on my iPhone 4S, but I understand that not everyone does. It gets frustrating when Siri doesn’t understand you and you to repeat yourself. Luckily for me, I don’t often have that problem. Siri understands me better than most people do.

In my weekly (for now) App of the Week blog post, I want to highlight some of the things that Siri allows me to do with my phone hands-free. This is especially great when I’m driving. And it feels so futuristic.

To activate Siri, I simply press the home button lightly to turn on the phone, then pick it up and hold it to my ear. (Alternatively, I can hold the home button down for a couple of seconds.) From there, I can just talk to Siri. Here are some examples of things I can do—I put the actual request in quotation marks, though variations work too; there isn’t a formula:

• Dictate an email or text message (“Send a text Aby to have a good day”)
• Play a specific song, a playlist or all songs by an artist from the music collection on my phone (“Play all Simon & Garfunkel songs”)
• Call someone in my contact list (“Call my husband, mobile”)
• Call a business, even it’s not in my contact list (“Call Niche Restaurant, St. Louis”)
• Find out the temperature and hourly forecast (“How warm is it outside?”)
• Send myself reminders (“In three hours, remind me to do ankle exercises”)

Requests require a confirmation, which I can do orally.

That’s just the hands-free stuff. And I expect it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The other great thing about Siri is that whenever the touch-screen keyboard comes up, I can press the microphone icon and dictate, rather than type. And it’s remarkably accurate (and easy to correct when there are mistakes).

I’ve had my phone two months (well, two months and four days, but who’s counting?). I still marvel whenever I use Siri handsfree to get stuff done.

If you have an iPhone 4S and never quite became enamored of Siri, I’d recommend trying some of these functions. Perhaps you’ll come to love her as much as I do.

Tagged with: app of the week, iphone, productivity, technology

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