The Real Guide to Using Siri

Hands up who uses Siri?

A lot? Sometimes? Only to see if you can get funny answers?

There are a lot people that don’t know about mysterious Miss Siri. Did you know for example that you can do this with her?

No? Here’s part one of our complete rundown on Siri – what she is, what she can do to improve your life, and the future she can bring us.

Siri is an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator. She’s basically an App, present on all Apple devices after Siri was acquired by Apple on April 28, 2010. The original application ceased to function on October 14, 2011.

She uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Web services. Apple claims that the software adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalizes results.

Although a lot of people think SIRI stand for ‘Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, the name Siri is actually Norwegian, meaning “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”. It was named after the intended name for the original developer’s first child.

Currently, Siri supports English (American, Canadian, Australian, British), French, German, Japanese, Italian (Italy, Switzerland), Spanish (Mexico, Spain), Mandarin (China, Taiwan), Korean, and Cantonese.

The original American voice was provided by Susan Bennett in July 2005. Now, in settings alongside your choice of language, you have an option of gender for Siri’s voice.

NOW, here’s the important stuff. Here’s what you can use Siri for to make your life more efficient:

SPORTS
Ask Siri for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer scores as well as schedules, rosters, and stats.

EATING
Ask Siri to search for restaurants or bars using different criteria. Siri will give you results based on these as well as photos, reviews, and reservations.

SOCIALISING
Siri can post to Facebook for you as well as on other people’s pages.

Siri can also tweet for you.

You can also search for recent tweets. Say, ” What is person’s name/company/brand saying?” and Siri will show you their most recent Tweets.

LAZINESS

With iOS 7, you can ask Siri to open apps. Just say something like “Play Angry Birds” or “Open iPhoto.” You can even say ‘Take a picture.’ Although Siri won’t actually take the picture for you, she’ll just open the app for you.
Use Siri to turn Bluetooth and other settings like WiFi on and off simply by saying, “Turn Bluetooth/WiFi Off/ On.”

ORGANIZATION

Tell Siri when and where you want to be reminded of something.

Schedule meetings. Say who, what, where, and when. Siri puts it on your calendar and sends an invitation to the person you’re meeting with via email.

In fact, Siri can write and send all of your emails or text messages or even organize for you to FaceTime with someone.

Use Siri to set the Alarm Clock for you.

Lastly, for Part one of All About Siri, we give you one of our favorite Siri features: What planes are above right now?

Stay tuned for Part Two so you’ll know how to use Siri to make your life more efficient! Until then, here’s some Siri inspired humor, just for you guys.