Monday, November 7, 2011

Siri (again): Will Remind, Will Remind, Will Remind Me

No, not the song by Royksopp.  Now that I've had a little more time to play with Siri, I may have stumbled upon one of its most useful additions to professional productivity: the ability to remind me to do things.  Let me elaborate.

iOS 5 has a built-in app called Reminders.  It isn't quite "Tasks", although when you open it up, you can swipe between Completed, Tasks, and Reminders.  I'm already using a different system for tasks, so the interesting part for me here is the Reminders part.  I had a little bit of trouble getting this to work the way I wanted, until I found some online sites that explained how to configure this. 

First, in the iOS 5 Settings, you need to turn on Location Services.  They have to be on for Reminders, too.  (I also have it on for Siri.)  Then, in the Mail/Contacts/Calendars setting, you go all the way to the very bottom and set Default List to Reminders (where it syncs with the iCloud).  If you leave it set to Tasks, it will sync with your work Exchange server, but that setting didn't handle Reminders the way I wanted.

If you've gotten past all of the techie stuff so far, I'll now explain how this is going to work in practice.  You can say to Siri "Remind me to call Barbara at 5pm", and Siri will dutifully repeat this back to you (to make sure it's right).  You confirm that it is, and Siri adds the reminder to your Reminders app list.  At 5pm, your iPhone 4S beeps to remind you to call Barbara. 

Now let's get fancier.  Siri can know where certain places are (such as your home and work).  You can say "Remind me when I leave work to stop by the dry cleaners."  No matter what time you leave work, you'll get beeped when you're geographically away from the location Siri knows as your work location.  You could also have a reminder such as "Remind me when I get to work to speak to Barbara about my orientation idea". 

Suddenly, you've got time-based reminders and location-based reminders.  Just when and where you need them.  How handy is that?

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