If you’re like most people, you probably use Siri to do things like control your home theater, set alarms, and even make phone calls. But there are a few things you can do with Siri that you might not have thought of. For example, you can ask her to play music from your iTunes library or ask her to find a restaurant in your area. But what if you want to respond to her voice without saying anything? That’s where the trick comes in. You can use the “Hey Siri” command to say something like “Hey Siri, how are you?” and she will then respond with a list of questions about your health or current events. If all of this sounds too complicated for you, there are also some other ways to respond to Siri without saying anything. For example, if you have an Echo device and want to control it from your voice, just say “Alexa” and she will start playing music from your Echo device’s speaker.
By default, Siri only responds when you press and hold the home button on your iPad or iPhone. You can, however, configure Siri to respond when you say “Hey Siri.”
Siri is useful as means for doing many things. She’s meant to be something of a digital personal assistant and, as such, can do a great deal more than simply looking stuff up on the Internet. She can take notes, set alarms, place calls, handle directions, and so on.
Using Siri won’t take long to figure out, but to completely master her, you will need to spend some time learning all the things she can do. To help make this easier and a bit more natural feeling, you can turn on her hands-free voice activation. (Note: If you have an iPhone 6 or older, you’ll need your phone to be plugged in for “Hey Siri” to work. The iPhone 6s and later do not have this limitation, and you can invoke “Hey Siri” at any time.)
Having “Hey Siri,” however, is a great way to interact with your device and is comparable to Android’s “Ok Google” as well as Microsoft’s upcoming “Hey Cortana” search feature in Windows 10 (this already available to Windows Phone users).
Enabling “Hey Siri”
“Hey Siri” isn’t enabled right out of the box. You have to first turn it on in the settings. To do this, unlock your iPad or iPhone and open the “Settings.” Tap on the “General” category and then tap on “Siri.
Siri doesn’t have a lot of options to deal with. First and foremost, there’s an option to completely turn her off, and then below that is the “Allow ‘Hey Siri’” toggle.
As long as we’re poking around in Siri’s settings, have a look at the other remaining options. You can turn Siri from a she to a he using the “Voice Gender” option. There’s also an option to configure “Voice Feedback” from “Always” to “Handsfree Only.”
You’re not stuck using only one identity with Siri either. Tapping the “My Info” button lets you assign who Siri talks to from your contacts.
Siri is also a serious polyglot as well, if you tap the “Language” button, you’ll see a wide and extensive array of different languages, often in several variations.
As we said, enabling “Hey Siri” is a great way to interact with your iOS device without having to look around, pick it up, and push the home button.
