How to: Make Siri more personable in iOS 7

It was in 2011 that Apple introduced Siri to the world. Siri been helping iOS users schedule their meetings, find places to eat, navigate them to the nearest coffee shop and remind them to get their tasks done on time. However, you can make her more personable by telling her where you work and live, who your family is and how to pronounce your name.

This makes it an amazing assistant. Once you’ve done this, you can give her very simple commands like “Call my mom”, “take me home” or “navigate me home”. Isn’t it more easier than saying “navigate me to [your home location]”. Btw, you will only do that if you are in the middle of nowhere. This is how you can get Siri to give you a catered service.

Tell Siri About Your Family

You can set up contacts in your phone so that it will know who your mom and dad are. You can do this manually or simply ask Siri to do it for you. After that, you tell Siri who your mom dad and siblings are, and if you’re married, you can tell her who your wife/husband is. For that you need to give her commands like “Zaheer is my dad” or if you’re a person of my type and have your dad’s name saved as dad, you tell Siri “Dad is my dad” which is weird I know, but you still need to tell Siri as its just a computer after all. For your partner you’ll tell Siri “[your wife/husband’s name] is my wife/husband” and likewise for your siblings and other contacts that you have family relationships with.

After this is done, you can give Siri commands like “Call my husband” or “Text dad” or “Call mom”. This makes it easier to text or call the people you would mostly talk to.

Tell Siri about Your Home & Work Location

The next thing you could do is tell Siri where you live and work so that whenever you’re lost who could ask Siri to navigate you to your home place or you could set a location-based task. Sadly, there is no voice command that you could give Siri to do that for you so you’ll have to do it manually by going to your contacts and add the location details in your own profile there in the home and work fields.

This will let you give Siri commands like “Remind me to check my mail when I get back home” or “Remind me to call mom when I reach my work place”. Now this is based on your GPS. When your phone finds out that you have reached home through your current location that the GPS will tell your phone, Siri will remind you to check your mail. Great, no?

Tell Siri How To Pronounce Your Name

Siri has a very good pronunciation of the English words as it has a pretty good grasp on English language and will call your name the right way. But not everybody has a common name. Plus, its not necessary that you have an English name. You might be a person like me and won’t get Siri call your name the right way the first time.

All you need to do is tell Siri “Thats not how my name is pronounced”. After this Siri will ask you how do you pronounce your name and you tell her how is it pronounced. Then, she calls your name in three different ways and lets you choose the best suiting pronunciation.

This is how you can personalise Siri to act as if she knows all about you. We hope you liked it. Let us know if you did 🙂