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How To Use Siri to Create Reminders For Any Location

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If you want to get more out of Siri, the new personal assistant app exclusive to the iPhone 4S, you’ll want to use location based reminders.

Location based reminders are part of the new iOS 5 Reminder App. These reminders allow you to get a prompt based on your location, opening up a number of possibilities.

You can ask Siri to create a Reminder based on a number of different locations, but if you want to get fancy, it will take some setup on your part.

Keep in mind that if you use location based reminders, you can hurt your battery life. If you do use these, be sure you read up on tips on how to get better battery life with the iPhone 4S.

How To Use Create a Location Reminder with Siri

Siri Location - Location of a contact

Set location based reminders with Siri.

Hold your Home Button for two seconds.

Tell Siri to, “Remind me to call Phil when I get to work.”

Siri will show you your reminder, and allow you to confirm or cancel.

When you arrive at the location, Siri will remind you to do whatever you asked.

This works for a number of locations, but Siri will need help to add them.

How to Teach Siri New Locations

Siri Location - Set School

Set Alternate Locations

Siri will let you add new locations to your contact record.

You can teach Siri a number of locations when creating a reminder. Here are a few locations Siri can add during conversation;

  • Work
  • Home
  • School
  • Gym

You can use Siri to create more reminders, but you’ll have to do some background work to get that set up. Trying to have Siri add other locations during conversation will just leave Siri confused, and you frustrated.

How to Add Even More locations for Reminders

If you want to add a business, intersection or address to use as a reminder, you can create a new contact, or add the address to an existing contact. If you have set up relationships with Siri, you can also use the nickname you created.

For example. I can set a reminder to do something when I get to a friend’s house by saying his name. If I want to set a reminder for when I get to my Mom’s, I can say, “Remind me to do the dishes when I get to Mom’s house.” and Siri can connect the relationship and her address to my reminder.

This also works with businesses. If I say, “Remind me to talk to Tim Cook about the iPhone 5 when I get to Apple Inc.”, Siri will create the reminder.

If you want to create reminders for when you get to a certain address, to the mall or a favorite store — you just need to create a contact and add the address.

  • To add an address to a contact, Open up Contacts.
  • Choose your contact.
  • Tap Edit.
  • Add an Address.
  • Save.

If you add a business, such as the local mall, you can create a relationship, or just call it the mall, to use Reminders there.

After you add the Mall, you can shorten things up, by creating a relationship. So that Remind me to get a gift at the Findlay Village Mall, is just the mall.

35 Comments

35 Comments

  1. Clayton

    10/21/2011 at 7:15 pm

    You don’t explain how to do anything!  You’re just saying “you can do it.” I’m going nuts here trying how to figure out how to add a location for “school.”

    • Adshdog

      10/23/2011 at 5:54 pm

      Actually, you just need to add school address under your contact. Remember to tag it as school(which you have to create by yourself) and give Siri sometimes.
      Only after a while that Siri realized that I already put my school address under my contact.

  2. JT

    10/24/2011 at 9:18 pm

    here is the full process once you get into contacts:
    Go to your name
    push Edit
    Add an address
    when you push it and you see “Home, Work, Other,” push EDIT at the top right
    then push Add Custom Label
    type in “school” (has to be lowercase, Siri likes it that way”
    then push “school”
    add your address and try it out.
    this should help

    • Guruboo

      10/25/2011 at 12:54 pm

      Actually, the easiest way to look up phone numbers & addresses is to use the map feature, search for “Horizon Elementary,” then you can hit on the pin which opens the side menu of contacts, save is at the bottom. Voila, you can now set the reminder without much hassle.

  3. joe

    10/27/2011 at 9:55 am

  4. Dale

    10/27/2011 at 2:27 pm

    I can create location based reminders with SIRI, however the reminders do not activate based on the locations. 
    I am in Canada though, but an address is an address, I would think it could figure this out.  I know you can’t search for restaurants etc. in Canada yet, but a GPS location should still be valid with a GeoFence for the Reminder.

  5. Reminderquestion

    10/30/2011 at 11:58 am

    Does location reminders use cell data. Because I set a location reminder but will not arrive at that location for at least a week. Is it going to chew up my data plan because of the gps and cell tower cross refrance or only true GPS.

  6. Valleymoods

    11/04/2011 at 3:21 pm

    so i get all this but does anyone know if this is only going to work in the USA. Im in the UK and would find these location based reminders a godsend..
    Cheers
    Lee

  7. Sarah Brown

    11/09/2011 at 4:33 am

    This doesn’t work if you set up a new contact for a place. It just refuses to recognise the place when you say its name, even when it gets a perfect match. I don’t want to set up random places as various addresses that “belong” to me, I want to set them up as business contacts, but it just won’t work from Siri. Anyone managed to get this working?

    • Guest

      12/07/2011 at 8:03 am

      In order to do this you need to say the place and the address type and then it will work.  I struggled with this for a while then “learned” Siri’s thought process.  So an example of the process for that is:

      [note: Best Buy is set up as a contact and it’s address is stored in the Work tagged address]

      Remind me to get milk when I leave Best Buy’s Work Address

      This will set a reminder based upon the location.

    • TangDiva

      12/26/2011 at 12:13 pm

      I did it both ways in USA and it wouldn’t work for me eithe

    • Elena

      01/07/2012 at 8:06 pm

      It worked for me. Thanks. It worked for “work” address. But didn’t work for “home” address. Whatever, as long as it works!

    • Richard

      08/25/2012 at 5:51 am

      I was having the same problem. It should look in your contacts for that name. You shouldn’t have to set a relationship just for it to work.

  8. Imthey

    12/25/2011 at 10:16 pm

    I can not find and of the reminders Siri made for me. Does anyone know where they are stored?

  9. downpour

    01/04/2012 at 6:21 am

    Siri is useless… I told it to set a reminder for a specific date and time…
    It recognised this fine and asked: “OK, what would you like me to remind you about”
    I then told it what I wanted the reminder to say… which it recognised exactly… but then proceeded to tell me: “I’m sorry I don’t understand.”

    You don’t need to understand it Siri, just place the text in the reminder like you just told me you would!!!

  10. B2958445

    01/08/2012 at 11:13 pm

    This is the worst article I’ve read. You don’t explain anything.

  11. Wm. Cerniuk

    03/24/2012 at 1:08 pm

    Does not work. I set an address book entry, with street address, for “Costco” and then asked Siri “remind me to return the shorts when I arrive at Costco”. Siri had the text come out perfect and proceeded to ask me when and what time instead of taking the location. After an exceedingly frustrating bout of trying to get Siri to remind me when I arrive anywhere, and Siri telling me that she can remind me at a time, when I leave or arrive somewhere… I gave up, Siri put “return the shorts when I arrive at Cosco” into the reminder. I then just swapped “home” with of “Cosco” in the same sentence and it worked.

    This article mentioned “the nickname you created” without ever mentioning creating a nickname. Some information missing from the article?

    • jlpatafm

      05/16/2013 at 10:17 am

      EXACTLY! This is over one year later, I’m on an iPhone 5 and Siri is still a piece of crap. I actually got it to work yesterday but today it won’t do a damn thing with location services. I can’t figure it out and it’s so frustrating.

  12. Wm. Cerniuk

    03/24/2012 at 1:20 pm

    Terrible article with respect to instruction.

  13. Mike

    04/16/2012 at 4:06 pm

    I found this and if your willing to add places like a store (Walmart for instance), and label it as a friend under your name then it seems to work ok…
    https://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/10/21/how-to-use-siri-to-create-reminders-for-any-location/

    This should help explain things a little better.  Josh, you need to explain things a little better a lot of people are having trouble getting this to work.

  14. Mike

    04/16/2012 at 4:07 pm

    Scroll down to what JT posted

  15. D

    08/28/2012 at 7:40 pm

    I created contacts and added required addresses to it. After that created location based reminders using contacts (i.e. shopping center, bus stop etc). And then I deleted all junk contacts to keep my contact list clean. :)

    But it is obvious to expect ability to add any address for location based reminders. Hopefully iPhone 5 will have it.

  16. tr

    10/04/2012 at 5:27 am

    set up your alternate “publix” or what-have-you contact using map app, pin it, add it to Contacts (adjust name from auto inserted street address). go into and edit YOUR contact card to add this as a Relationship. that is, mother, brother, etc….scroll down and add a new relationship name, e.g. Publix. also, may work best to say entire reminder sentence at once, e.g.: “Remind me to buy stuff when I get to Publix.”

  17. Andrew McCartney

    10/10/2012 at 9:25 pm

    Seriously badly written how-to article that neglects to actually describe the ‘how to’. Lazy work.

    Having spent 30 mins testing various steps in the more helpful comments, here’s what worked for me:

    1. Create a contact, either from a search result in Maps or in the contacts app

    2. Add a Work or Home address for the contact. In this example I added a Work address.

    3. Make sure that you give the contact a First and Last Name – even if it’s a business (Siri does not recognize the Company field) e.g first name “Apple” and last name “Store”

    4. Launch Siri and say “Remind me to buy a mouse when I get to Apple Store Work”

    The key is to say “when I get to [First name] [Last name] [Home/Work]”.

    That works 100% (tested on iPhone 4S and 5).

    • Mark

      12/11/2012 at 1:03 pm

      Thanks, Andrew, for finally explaining what this poorly written article doesn’t.

      However, contrary to your claim, Siri *does* in fact recognize the Company field. I just did this with my local diner — name in the company field + address with “work” label — and just now I added a reminder by saying “Remind me to check email when I get to Joe’s Diner.” I did not say the words “home,” “work,” or “address.” I simply stated the restaurant’s name, which I had entered as a contact, via Maps, moments before.

      Of course I fully believe that it did *not* work when you tried it. I, too, have had unpredictable and inconsistent results, setting locations for Siri. But something else — some tiny exception or other factor — much have caused the failure in your case, because I’ve just experienced the opposite.

      Clearly, the fact that we’re all having such difficulty with this indicates that Apple needs to improve this process. (For the record, I’m on an iPhone 5 running iOS 6.0.1.)

      • Mark

        05/28/2013 at 2:45 am

        Follow-up to my previous post:

        I don’t like adding “relationships” to my own contact record. So, just now, I added a special entry in Contacts for “The Gym.”

        INSTRUCTIONS:

        Starting in the Maps app, I searched for my gym by its actual name, found it, tapped on the arrow to get to the options, then saved that address to Contacts, making sure to create a *new* entry, since my gym’s info already existed in Contacts. Then, in the Contacts app, I *changed* the name of my gym (in this new entry) to “The Gym.” BTW, I did so in the *company* field, NOT the first and last name fields.

        (Optional: In the Notes field, I wrote “Special entry for Siri.”)

        Then, to test this, I told Siri to “Remind me to say hey to Mike when I get to the gym.”

        NOTE: The first 2 times I tried this, Siri complained that I had not yet specified my gym’s location and prompted me to add the address to my OWN contact record. I did NOT do so. But then — on my 3rd attempt (approx. 2-3 minutes after creating the special gym entry) — the exact same command suddenly worked.

        So — just as someone mentioned above — it can indeed take a couple of minutes for the address to hit iCloud, making Siri “aware” of the new address.

        RECAP:

        • It is NOT necessary to create relationships.

        • When you store a new address, you can add a location’s actual (or generic) name in the CONTACTS field. (if you already have a contact entry for that business, create a 2nd, “dummy” entry with the generic name.)

        • Finally, it may take a few minutes for Siri to become “aware” of the new address.

  18. david

    11/05/2012 at 3:23 am

    Hey guys you can also download the Location Alerts app (paid), it’s pretty cool.

  19. Jevon

    06/30/2013 at 9:17 pm

    SOLUTION: The best solution is to ADD directly to ICLOUD contacts.

  20. Kay West

    09/22/2013 at 5:14 pm

    I also would like to know where these reminders are stored. I asked Siri to remind me to take an item with me when I left home and now she reminds me every time I leave home.

    • soundsgoodgrav

      09/22/2013 at 6:15 pm

      Have you tried looking in the Reminders app? :-)

      • Kay

        09/22/2013 at 6:40 pm

        It wasn’t there. I finally found it by going to iCloud and checking the iCloud reminder as completed.

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