You can use Siri to control Apple TV settings on your 4th generation Apple TV, and this is especially useful if you want to reduce a movie's background sounds. This feature of Apple TV not only makes the dialog more audible, but also reduces the chances that you'll disturb your neighbors.
Siri
How to Use Siri to Convert Currency and Measurements
By Jim Karpen
Even if you're pretty good at doing math in your head, there are so many different measures that you may often find yourself needing to do conversions. For example, when I'm watching tennis on TV and the announcer says the serve was 220 kilometers per hour, I'm fairly clueless. So I just ask Siri to convert to the more familiar mph. (And that would be 137 mph—definitely a fast serve.) Siri can convert currencies and also measures such as distance, weight, volume, cooking measures, temperature, and speed. Plus, since the introduction of iOS 9, there are two ways to get Siri to do conversions: ask Siri or use Spotlight Search—which is basically sending Siri a text message.
How to Ask Siri If You’ve Received That Important Email Yet
By Conner Carey
Instead of waiting by the phone for a call or text, what if you’re waiting for an important email? Sure, every few minutes you could unlock your phone, visit the mail app, open your Inbox, and see if it’s arrived. Or, you can ask Siri if you’ve received that email yet. Remember asking your parents from the back of the car, “Are we there yet?” Well, here’s how to ask Siri if that email is here yet.
How to Set up Contextual Reminders with Siri
By Conner Carey
Setting reminders for yourself on your iPhone has never been easier. With iOS 9, Siri has received a major intelligence boost and is capable of understanding terms such as "it" or "this," which means you can now ask Siri to set a contextual reminder based on what you are looking at on your iPhone screen.
How to Use Siri to Turn Low-Power Mode On and Off
By Conner Carey
Low-Power Mode is a battery life saver when your iPhone is running out of juice. It’s easy enough to navigate your Settings and turn it on; however, Siri can do it for you even faster.
How to Easily Invite and Email Frequent Contacts
By Conner Carey
iPhone Proactive suggestions are really helpful sometimes. If you often invite the same group of people to meetings or events, or if you often email the same group of people, your iPhone will make it easy to continue to do so. Both the Calendar and Email app will provide suggestions when you begin to add commonly grouped contacts.
How to Ask Siri to Play the Rest of the Album
By Jim Karpen
There are likely occasions when you're listening to a playlist or to shuffled music, or listening to Apple Music, and you hear an artist you like — and you want more. At that very moment you want to listen to more from the album or to hear more from that particular artist. Siri is here to help.
How To Utilize iOS 9 Proactive Assistant
By Conner Carey
Proactive Assistant was one of the new features introduced with iOS 9. Since then, I’ve noticed a lot of misunderstanding as to just what Proactive Assistant does, how to utilize it, and how to turn it off. Proactive Assistant pays attention to what you do and where you use your phone. Proactive Assistant works with Siri to give you Spotlight Suggestions but the habit learning program has it’s own set of suggestions to help you out.
One of the interesting new features of iOS 9 is its "proactive" smarts. Apple wants your device to anticipate what you want to do depending on the context. A good example of that is how your iPhone or iPad now responds when you plug in earbuds or headphones. Your device figures that you want to listen to something, and a small icon appears in the lower left corner of your lock screen that shows the most recent audio app you've been using, whether that's Apple Music, Spotify, Podcasts, or any other app.
How to Turn off Contact Suggestions from Mail
By Conner Carey
With iOS 9, your iPhone looks through the Mail app to let you know who might be calling when an unknown number comes in. This is true for outgoing calls as well; iOS 9 will try to match the number you’re calling with a contact from emails. If this is a function you’d like to turn off, here’s how.
How to Follow Your Favorite Sports Teams with Siri
By Conner Carey
Siri received some major upgrades in iOS 9. One of the new ways you can use Siri is to ask about game schedules, scores and stats, and team members. If you have a favorite team, you can find out when they’re playing next as well.
How to Disable Calendar Event Suggestions in Mail
By Conner Carey
An interesting new feature of iOS 9 is auto email event suggestions for your Calendar. The software scans your emails to see if there are any events you haven't added to your schedule. This can be very helpful, especially if a lot of your emails contain pertinent events. However, if you find yourself with a cluttered calendar, you can easily turn off the automatic addition.
How to Mute Siri Using Your iPhone Mute Switch
By Conner Carey
Previously, whether your iPhone was muted or not, Siri's voice would loudly chime. With iOS 9, you can set Siri's voice to mute when your phone, too, is muted. This is easily changed in Settings and convenient when asking the new and improved Siri questions in quieter locations.
How to Edit Calendar Events with Siri
By Jim Karpen
I'm finding it so much easier to interact with my personal information apps via Siri compared to opening the app and entering the information, especially setting a calendar event or a reminder. You just speak a few words and it's done. What I didn't know, until recently, is that you can also use Siri to edit events.
How to Keep Siri from Mixing up Events and Reminders
By Jim Karpen
It can be really handy to use Siri to create events and reminders — so much faster than opening the app and doing it manually. However, you need to be careful how you word your request, because Siri will sometimes mix things up: creating an event when you wanted a reminder, and vice versa.
As a tennis player, I often need to know when sunset will be (since the outdoor courts where I play don't have lights). Conveniently, Siri can tell me the time of sunrise and sunset. You cannot only find the time for today but also for any day of the next week. (Note, however, that Siri won't give you information for dates in the past.)
How to Place Calls Directly from Call Reminder Notifications
By Violet Cooper
If you need to call someone, but it's not convenient to place the call right now, you can use the Reminders app to help you remember to make the call later. If you use Siri to create the call reminder, you'll be able to call the person directly from the reminder notification.
Tip of the Day: Use Siri to Add Punctuation to Emails or Text Messages
By Sarah Kingsbury
Do you prefer to text in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Are you one of those people who know when you should use a comma versus when you should use a semicolon? Did you know that you can use Siri to punctuate your texts and emails like a pro?
The utility I use the most on my iPhone is the calculator. I use it often to reconcile my checkbook, calculate discounts in the store, and more. but when I use the iPhone's calculator to add up a list of numbers, it doesn't offer a record of what I input, so I don't know if I made an error tapping numbers in.
It took me over a year to get in the habit of using Siri, partly because she seemed so human-like. I was worried I'd say something dumb. One day I finally got it: there ain't no one listening. And ever since then I've used Siri with abandon. Lately I was surprised to discover that Siri offers a helpful guide to what you can say or ask.