The star feature of the iPhone 4S surprised us all, unfortunately Spanish was not one of the supported languages. Almost a year later, we already have available Crab in the language of Cervantes for iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and 6rd generation iPad. The virtual assistant, although still in beta, works correctly, and has been improving with each update. Even so, Siri still has two details to squeeze, on the one hand it could increase its speed in terms of response and on the other hand allow its integration with third-party applications. But in short, in general terms, it is a very useful service for day to day, and since iOS XNUMX has already been released and you will be messing with the new version, we will review possible uses for Siri.
Telephone functions
- Calls and Facetime: we can use Siri to make conventional calls or video calls through Facetime. It is not a complex action, but it saves us time, especially if we do it from the lock screen. If the contact has more than one phone number, they will ask us which one we want to call and we can also ask them to show us the history of missed calls.
- Contacts: with this function we can perform a search for a contact to see its information. Here it is interesting to highlight that when you display the contact card, we can click on your phone number, email or address to open the corresponding application and perform the action. Another interesting detail is that we can ask Siri when is the birthday of a friend or relative, and if we have that information in their contact, they will give us their birthday.
- Messages: this is one of the features that saves me the most time on a day-to-day basis. We can send messages to our contacts, and also Siri will use iMessage when possible. There are several formulas to send a message, but the fastest is the following: "send a message to X contact with the text Y". In addition, we can not only send messages, but we can also ask you about the unread messages that we have and we can answer from there.
Productivity
- Email: another of the great possibilities of Siri is to send emails. We can send an email with the specified text to one of our contacts or make a multiple send simply by dictating more than one address. But you can also show us our last 25 inbox messages and reply to them from Siri. Similarly, it can also show us the emails in the inbox of a specific contact, acting as an inbox filter.
- Calendar: Siri is part of the day to day, and one of the best questions that can be asked is: what events do I have for today ?, and Siri will read us our daily agenda. Although this is not the only thing you can do, we can also create events from scratch or modify existing ones.
- Reminders: this function also saves us time, by creating a reminder from Siri itself. In addition, it is interesting to mention that we can create reminders based on time or location. We also have the possibility to view existing reminders, modify them and create a reminder in a specific list.
- Notes: the options that Siri gives us to take notes are: take a new note and show our created notes. In the same way we can also add information to our existing notes.
- Clock: Siri gives us the possibility to set alarms and timers. As for the alarms, we can create a new alarm or modify the alarms that we have predefined. Regarding the timers, we can start a new stopwatch or modify one already activated. Another function that we can do with Siri is to ask what time it is anywhere in the world.
Leisure
These three functions came from the hand of iOS 6, at WWDC 2012 Apple presented the improvements that Siri would bring, and the new functionalities included were:
- Sports: Our beloved assistant will provide us with information on football (Liga BBVA), basketball (NBA), baseball, American football and ice hockey. As for the information that you will return to us about Spanish football, you will be able to answer questions about the result of your favorite team, the results of the last day and the league classification. At the moment he has no information on European championships.
- Movies: In Apple's words, Siri is a true movie buff. We can search for cinemas near our position or ask you for information about films, directors or actors. Although we lose the possibility of reading the reviews and Rotten Tomatoes score.
- Restaurants: aided by the Yelp integration, we will be able to search for restaurants based on type of cuisine, price, location and terrace. We can also see your score, reviews, price and provide us with information such as the telephone number and the map of the place.
Social Media
Another of the new features that Siri will bring in iOS 6 is the ability to post messages on the main social networks. In the case of Twitter we can post a tweet and in the case of Facebookwe can update our status or post a message on our wall.
Maps
One category that can greatly benefit from using Siri is Maps. The assistant is very interesting in these situations because we will not have to type, if not to dictate the commands with voice.
- Maps: we can ask him to take us home, to work, to a friend's house, to guide us to a city or a street or to a business or store. In addition, we can use a little trick and add to our contact the address of our work or our gym and ask him to take us there.
- find my friends: we can also use this Apple service to locate our friends or family and ask them to direct us to their position.
Other uses
Most of the uses of Siri have already been reviewed, but there are still some to comment, and that we cannot miss:
- Time: It may seem like a small detail, but since I use Siri I don't need a weather application. The assistant can show us the forecast for the whole day or for a part of the day such as morning or afternoon; the forecast for our location or another city; the forecast for the week or weekend; and we can even ask if it will rain or not. As you can see in the image, Siri is sensitive to heat.
- Stock Exchange: Siri will also act as a stock broker and will give us information about the status of a certain company or a certain stock index.
- Web search: from the wizard we can do any search on the web or search directly in Wikipedia.
- Open apps: simply say the name of the application, this action is especially fast if we are in an application and we want to search for another or directly to open an application without having to search for it among the others.
Interesting details
In addition to this review of the main Siri functions, there are more interesting details to discuss about the assistant. On the one hand, it is important to highlight that Siri is very useful in situations in which we cannot use our hands continuously; It will also be a very good complement for blind people; and in addition to using it on the main screen we cannot forget that we can also activate it on the locked screen and while using other applications. Another of the best known details of Siri is its peculiar sense of humor, in Spanish it will also surprise us with some witty or funny answer, although not as much as in English.
As a negative point of the Siri version in Spanish, we cannot make use of Wolfram AlphaSo we miss out on a large database for asking Siri questions, and will have to resort to searching the web more often.
Thanks to AppleweBlog