Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Keisha: I love your tips, Rick. They’ve helped me so much since I started reading your blog.
I especially like the way you answer people’s questions, and now I have a problem of my own that I hope you can help me with.
I use Siri for various things when I’m in meetings, but her voice is disruptive to the others in the room. I’m tired of getting evil stares when Siri answers me lol.
How can I disable Siri’s voice so she’ll answer my queries with text only? Thanks. [Read more…]
Apple’s Siri virtual assistant certainly makes using an iPhone a lot easier, but just like us humans Siri has a few quirks.
One Siri quirk that drives me up the wall is how she tends to mis-pronounce some names on the Contacts List. For some reason it just grates on my nerves.
The good news is you can train Siri to pronounce difficult names correctly, using one of the two methods listed below: [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Question from Susan: I was waiting to get on the subway the other day when the guy standing beside me pulled out his iPhone and asked Siri a question.
I was shocked when Siri answered him because she used a British accent. I thought that was SO cool.
Can I change my own iPhone to speak with a British accent?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Have you ever fallen asleep only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from someone who had no idea how late it was (or who simply didn’t care)?
Or perhaps you’ve signed up for a class and you’d rather not disturb everyone in the room with an endless barrage of notification sounds?
If you have an iPhone you can easily avoid situations like that by enabling a special mode called “Do Not Disturb” Here’s how:
1 – Swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen.
2 – Tap the Focus icon (it looks like a crescent moon).
3 – Tap Do Not Disturb.
To disable “Do Not Disturb”, simply toggle the setting back to Off.
That’s all there is to it. Now you know how to enable and disable your iPhone’s “Do Not Disturb” feature.
If you use an iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch you know how handy Siri can be at times.
But what you might not know is Siri is constantly snooping on your conversations, and that even includes face-to-face conversations that don’t involve a phone call!
What happens is Siri records your conversations for use in training Siri to better understand how you speak and how it should respond to the things you say.
But Siri doesn’t do this “learning” all on it’s own. It has help from human contractors that Apple pays to listen to their customers’ recorded conversations and then provide feedback to help Siri improve.