How to Make Siri More Personable in iOS 7

Ever since Apple introduced Siri to the world in 2011, she’s been helping iOS users schedule meetings, find places to eat, navigate them to the nearest coffee shop and help remind them to get certain tasks done on time. Siri is quite the whole package, but she’s also just a computer. However, you can make her more personable by telling her where you work and live, as well as who your family is, and even how to pronounce your name.

By doing this, you can make your commands to Siri much simpler, by telling her things like “call my dad,” or “navigate me home” if you’re in the middle of nowhere. These things are a lot more natural to say than just “call Bob Smith” or “navigate to [your home address].” Here’s how to make Siri recognize all of your personal details in order to provide you a catered experience.

Tell Siri About Your Family

You can set up your contacts so that your phone will know who your mom and dad are, as well as any siblings you may have. You can enter them all in manually in the Contacts app, or you can save yourself some time and just tell Siri. Hold down on the Home button until Siri pops up, and then say something like, “Bob Smith is my dad,” or if you’re like me and have your dad’s name in your contacts as “dad,” just say to Siri, “Dad is my dad.” It’ll sound weird, but once Siri sets it up, you can easily refer to him as your dad to Siri. Do this for all your contacts that you have a family relationship with. You can even let Siri know if you’re married or not by saying “Jane Smith is my wife.”

From now on, you can say commands to Siri, such as “Text my wife” or “call dad,” making it easier to get a hold of your loved ones without a lot of awkward dialogue friction getting in your way.

Set Your Home and Work Locations

In order to make it easier to get directions back to your house, or to set a location-based reminder once you arrive at work, it’s a good idea to set your home and work locations. Sadly, you can’t tell Siri to set your home and work locations, so you have to do it manually in the Contacts app by tapping on your name and adding addresses for your work and home locations. Once you have them penned in, though, it’s off to the races.

You’ll be able to tell Siri commands like “take me home” or even set reminders such as “remind me to get the mail when I get home.” You can also set location-based reminders for when you’re leaving home or work, so something like “remind me to pick up groceries when I leave work” will set a reminder that will chime when your phone sees that you’re leaving work, based on your GPS location.

Tell Siri How to Pronounce Your Name

Siri has a pretty good grasp of the English language, and this includes proper nouns like names. However, not everyone has a common name like Mike, Bob, Bill, etc. If you have a hard-to-pronounce name, you can tell Siri how to pronounce it correctly.

When Siri mispronounces your name, simply say “that’s not how you pronounce my name.” Siri will then ask you for the correct pronunciation, and then she’ll say your name back to you three different ways so you can choose the best one. If all else fails, you can just have her call you Sexy.