Help Siri to Help You Series - Calendar













1. Creating an appointment





Fiddling around with Apple’s Calendar app to get an appointment into your diary can be irritating. Some people use other apps with AI skills to take the key points from an event, using natural language and then adds the information directly.





However, with Siri you can do this without the need for third party alternatives.





Say you are going to a retirement party for a colleague John, that will last 90 minutes, at work on the 1st March starting at 5pm.





After initiating Siri, say: ‘Create an appointment for the 1st March at 5pm’. Siri will create an appointment that says ‘Appointment’ at 5pm four one hour on 1st March.





To get this looking more how you want it, after Siri announces the creation of the event, initiate the Assistant again and say ‘change title’, Siri will ask for the new title and you say ‘Retirement party for John’.





Siri will ask if you want to update the event and instead of saying ‘yes’ just say, ‘change duration’, Siri will ask how long the appointment is and you say 90 minutes.





After confirming this, Siri will ask if you are happy to update. Instead of saying ‘Yes’, say add location. Siri will ask for this and in this example, you say ‘work’.





All the details are now correct, so when Siri says are you ready to update, feel free to say ‘Yes”.





This seems to be a long process, but in reality it is quite short and gets the job done.





2. Moving, deleting and amending





Sometimes things change and we might need to alter what is in our diary.





Continuing with the example above, the time for John’s retirement event might change to 4.30pm.





Say to Siri, ‘’change the start time for my appointment ‘Retirement Party for John”. Siri will ask for the new time and you say 4.30pm. The Assistant then moves the appointment 30 minutes earlier and will confirm.





What if John decides he will have his party on another day altogether but hasn’t decided when yet. You may want to delete the present appointment for the time being until the new date is known.





Just say to Siri: ‘Delete my appointment called ‘Retirement Party for John’ on the 1st March at 5pm. Siri will ask for confirmation and, once you give it, the appointment will be gone.





You can also amend the appointment by initiating Siri and telling the Assistant to change some element of the appointment. This includes the title, date and time, and venue.





3. Shortcut for Adding an Appointment





If you want to use a Siri Shortcut rather than use the voice actions, this will work:









Hope these tips make using the Calendar app easier.





Brian

10th February 2010







