6 Ways to Turn Siri into a Powerful Tool

Just How Powerful?

Many people, when they get a new iPhone play around with Siri like "Where to hide a dead body?" or "Tell me a joke." than totally forget about the feature.  The sad part is, is that Siri is a powerful tool if used correctly, it can do many things that no one even realizes and will never take advantage of because it's treated as a joke to most people.  I'm going to show you some powerful and useful things that Siri can do and some you may know and some may even amaze you.


Sports Scores/Schedule/Standings

You can ask Siri to display scores from any games just played, future schedule for week, month or season and overall standings for any sports league.  You can even call up leaders in goals, home-runs, ERA, stolen bases and pretty much every stat you want.  She will even tell you who the leaders is and a quick synopsis of the game.

"Results from last Blue Jays                                                            "Baseball home run           Game"                                                                                                 leaders"
                                                                                           

 

Restaurants/Directions and ETA

Ask Siri to find local restaurants or you could be more specific.  She will bring up a list with star ratings, price ratings and her recommendation.  Select one and the profile will have yelp reviews, phone number, hours of operation and a map.  Touch the map and she will navigate you to the restaurant.  While navigating hold the home button and say "ETA" and she will tell you when you should arrive.

"Local sushi restaurants?"                                                              Touch to get super detailed 

                                                                                                            profile complete with map.

Open Anything and Everything

If you have a ton of apps on your phone and need something quickly or just cant seem to find something just tell Siri to find it.  It will work with almost anything.  Native apps, installed apps, specific settings menus and games.  You can tell Siri to turn on and off certain settings without going to the menu like "Turn off Wi-Fi.", "Do not disturb" or "Delete all alarms".  Saying "Take a picture" will open the camera.  Saying "Open all Camera apps" will give you a list of apps that use the camera that you can choose from.

"Open Siri settings"                                                                           "Open AppiDay."

Weather and a Whole Lot More

If you ask Siri anything to do with the weather she will answer the specific question and then pull up a weather report for your area.  She does this every-time not just simply answering the question.  It's a very nice touch.  Examples of questions that will also generate a weather report are: "What phase is the moon in?", "When is sunrise/sunset?", "What's the humidity.", "Is it windy?", "What's the barometric pressure?", "Will it rain today/tomorrow?" and the list goes on.

"When is sunrise today?"                                                                  "Is it windy outside?"

Have Siri Read Out-loud

This is a great feature if you are driving and someone sends you a text or email.  Tell Siri to "read latest email/text message" and she will bring up your latest unread text message, tell you who it's from then read the contents out-loud for you.  Same goes for emails.  You can even have her read any notes you have made or appointments and reminders.

"Read latest email."                                                                           "Read note To Do."

Note: Happy Endings is a sub-reddit, nothing sexual.

Siri is a Reference Champion

Wolfram Alpha is a powerful tool in itself and you can get it as a stand-alone app but Siri uses it for a lot of functions.  Ask Siri any math question, science question or language question and she will go right to Wolfram Alpha for the answer.  You can ask her to "Define" a word, "What is?" will bring up Wikipedia.  When you ask to define a word she will actually read the  definition out to you as well as display it.

"What is Methadone?"                                                                       "What is dog in Spanish?"

Final Words

There are other lots of other tricks that Siri can perform but I thought I would start off with some of the more powerful and useful ones just to have everyone give them a try.  They might take some getting used to but once you start getting the hang of it you will see just how useful Siri can be and is not just some app to tell dirty jokes to.