Category Archives: Siri

Multilingual Completion

At times I’ve been frustrated that when I’m trying to type a Spanish word on my iPhone, I’m only offered completions in English. For example, if I wanted to type the Spanish word for ostrich, avestruz:

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It finally occurred to me that I could add a Spanish keyboard to my Keyboard settings:

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Now, when I’m in an app or on a web site where I’m likely to type in Spanish, I can easily change the keyboard and get Spanish-language completions.

It gets better: if a second-language keyboard such as Spanish is merely enabled, it affects the keyboard completion behavior such that completions from either your first or second language is included. Here I am typing “aves” in the English keyboard, but completion is smart enough to infer that I’m looking for “avestruz”:

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I had hoped that iOS’s willingness to cross language barriers might also apply to Siri dictation, but alas no. “All these truths” is the closest it can muster when I speak “avestruz”:

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However, having the Spanish keyboard at hand means I can quickly switch keyboards and dictate as expected:

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If you find yourself frequently typing a foreign-language word and hoping for some help from your phone, be sure to install a keyboard for the language so that iOS knows you’re interested in its suggestions!

Named Watch Faces

It’s starting to look as though it will be common with watchOS 3 to configure multiple watch faces for different life contexts. It will now be easier than ever to swipe between watch faces, and multiple faces of the same base kind can even be configured with different complications suitable to a particular context.

To drive this home and aid in reminding users the intention for each face, it would be useful to apply our own names to them:

“Exercise”
“Work”
“Weekend”
“School”
“Relaxing”
“Childcare”

Best yet, giving names to the configured watch faces provides Siri with a handle for affording seamless integration, such that you could easily switch between the named faces with phrases like:

“Hey Siri, put on your Game face.”

Anything I expect to do frequently on my Watch, I will value being able to do hands-free with Siri. In order to achieve that, everything I would like to switch to, activate, or deactivate, needs to have a name. I wrote previously about this in Labeled Siri Alarms, so I guess my head is in a place where I’m looking for every opportunity to enlist Siri’s help. This is one area where I think I would use such help many times per day.

(Radar #26883175)