Summon Siri

There are two ways to summon Siri. The first is to press and hold the Home button—or the side button on devices without Home buttons—until you see “What can I help you with?” on the screen.

Or you can use the voice-activated Hey Siri, which you can enable in Settings > Siri & Search > Listen for “Hey Siri” (it should be enabled by default).

To use Hey Siri, say, “Hey Siri” and speak your query—you don’t have to wait for Siri to activate.

Set Up Siri

In addition to Hey Siri, there are other important settings to check in Settings > Siri & Search:

• Your spoken language: Tap Language to select the language that you want to speak to Siri with. You should choose the language you are most fluent in, but this is also a fun way to practice speaking in a foreign language.

• Siri’s accent and gender: Tap Siri Voice. Depending on the selected language, you may see accent options. Tap the accent that you want to hear when Siri speaks.

• Introducing yourself: You can tell Siri, “Take me home” to get directions to your residence, but first, Siri must know who you are. Tap My Information and then pick your contact entry from the list. If you don’t have one, make one in the Contacts app.

  To check who Siri thinks you are, you can ask “Who am I?”

Siri lets you refer to people by relationship. For example, I can tell Siri to “call my wife” instead of “call Hannah Centers.” You can teach Siri the identity of most of your family members and other important people in your life.

To set this up, make sure you have a card for the person in the Contacts app. Then do one of the following:

• Tell Siri: Invoke Siri and tell her about the relationship. For example, I can say, “Hannah Centers is my wife”; after confirmation, that relationship is set. You can check this with Siri later with queries like “Who is my wife?” and “Who is my boss?”

• Tell the Contacts app: Open your card in Contacts, tap Edit in the upper-right corner, scroll down, tap “add related name,” tap the default relationship to pick the desired relationship, tap the info icon, and select the person’s card. Tap Done.

Learn Some Useful Siri Commands

Siri understands more commands than I can list here, and not every Siri command is the most efficient way to complete a task. Here are some of the ones I’ve found to be useful:

• Identify songs: While a song is playing, activate Siri and ask what song is playing. If Siri finds a match, you see the name of the song, the artist, and a button to buy the song in the iTunes Store. If you subscribe to Apple Music, you can play the entire song right there.

• Make phone calls: You can use Siri to place phone calls, which is especially handy while driving. Say “Call contact’s name” to initiate a call (if your contact has multiple phone numbers, Siri asks you which one to call—or you can preempt that step by saying “Call Jane Smith’s iPhone.”). If you’ve configured relationships, as explained above, you can instead say, “Call my mom,” or “Call my spouse.”

• Remind me to…: You can tell Siri to remind you of things, like “Remind me to take the trash out Tuesday night,” but what I’ve found even more useful is telling Siri to remind me to do a task when I reach or leave a destination. For example, “Remind me to change the cat litter when I get home,” or “Remind me to pick up diapers when I leave.”

• Remind me of “this”: Siri can create contextual reminders for Safari webpages, Mail messages, Maps locations, and more. Tell Siri, “Remind me about this,” while looking at a relevant item.

• Search photos and videos: You can use Siri to search for photos and videos by time or location. For example: “Show me photos from San Francisco,” or “Show me videos from Christmas 2015.” Photos recognizes objects, so you can say something like, “Show me pictures of water.”

• Set an alarm: There are several ways to set an alarm. You can say, “Set an alarm for 6 A.M.” before bed. Or when you lie down for a nap, you can say, “Wake me in 30 minutes.” You can also say, “Delete my alarm,” to view a list of alarms to delete.

• Set a timer: I use this all the time in the kitchen. Tell Siri to set a timer for however many hours, minutes, or seconds you need. For example, “Set a timer for 5 minutes.”

• Find sports info: I’ve found that Siri is the fastest way to find out things like “When do the Braves play next?,” “What time is the Mavericks game?,” and “Who won the Titans game?”

• Go home: If you’re in unfamiliar territory and just want to go home, say “Siri, take me home” (assuming you’ve set up Siri to know where your home is, as I described above).