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How to Make Siri Remember Where You Live and Work

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Siri, the new personal assistant app for the iPhone 4S is pretty amazing, but lately, I found that she is slacking.

After teaching Siri a number of locations and using location based reminders, Siri forgot where I lived.

The address was there in my contact card, but Siri kept telling me, I don’t know where your home is.”

Puzzled I tried adding linking to another contact card, which resulted in two home addresses. Don’t do this. It results in a round robin of Siri asking you which address you want, “Home or Home” that never ends.

Read: What is Siri?

It turns out that most of my problems come back to the fact that Google Maps, which powers the location data for location-based reminders, just recently learned where I live. When I view my location on the iPhone, it believes I live at an address that does not exist in real life. A bother, but one I can at least work around.

Instead of making this my home address, I added it as a work address, so that I don’t accidentally share this address with someone and miss out on a delivery. I work from home, so this works out pretty well. If you need to use Work for your job, pick one of the other address labels.

To perform these steps, you will need to be at the location you want Siri and your contacts to remember. Make sure you add this to your iCloud contact card.

How To Help Siri Remember Where Home Is

Teach Siri Where You Live and Work

Remember this time Siri.

1. Open up Maps

2. Tap on the Arrow icon in the lower left.

3. Tap on the glowing orb it adds to the map.

4. When it shows you your Current Location, tap on the arrow to the right.

– In my case it shows a street address that doesn’t exist, but testing shows Siri will use this as a reminder location for me pretty reliably.

5. On the Info page, tap on Add to Contacts, in the lower left.

6. Choose Existing Contact.

7. Pick your iCloud Contact card.

8. Assign a proper location tag to it. You can use Home if you make sure that you don’t share it with someone accidentally.

From now on, you should be able to use Siri to create location-based reminders in the Reminders app without any trouble. You’ll need to do the same thing for other locations that fail to show up correctly on your iPhone Maps app.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Star Zagofsky

    11/01/2011 at 10:31 am

    Nice tip!

  2. drench

    11/03/2011 at 2:35 am

    If you have a street name that googlemaps does not recognize (ie new road, or say you live in Bath UK where street names often have minor street names), these will mess up your location reminders. Google maps is more up to date with post codes … so save home (or work)  in contacts with ONLY post code, town/city, country info and this will prevent the unknown street name messing up Siri location services. You have to save your proper address under the address tag, where it will not be used by the location service.

    Latitude and Longitude would be better, but Siri adds country to the search which messes up that option.

  3. Olli Hull - Olli43 (@ollihull)

    09/15/2012 at 3:43 am

    OR

    Once you have entered your home address, tap it. It will take you to the maps app. Once you’re on the maps app drop a pin on the **road** next to where you live. Add this pin as an address and delete the one you had previously. Change the name of the address to home (its a default *tag*) and it should be working!!

    Ask Siri to take you home and you will cheer as it send you on your way.

    Woot Woot

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