Tame Siri and Search

Find out how to personalize your device’s helpful nature

REQUIRES

An iOS 12 device

YOU WILL LEARN

Ways to use Siri & Search to improve your iPhone and iPad experience

IT WILL TAKE

10 minutes With the introduction of iOS 12 came a bunch of improvements and customizations for Siri & Search that improve your iPhone and iPad’s helpfulness.

After using iOS 12 for a while, it’ll suggest actions on the Lock screen when you wake your device. These are the result of on–device intelligence that learns about your usage — not just of Apple’s own software, but third–party apps too. If an app’s been updated to work with this, suggestions may be very specific, such as “Show my recent contacts” in Cardhop or “Schedule for today” in Fantastical.

Siri takes repetition, the time of day, and your location into account for its suggestions. As well as the Lock screen, these suggestions can appear in iOS’s search results and Look Up feature. You may want to stop info from some apps leaking out onto the Lock screen in particular, so we’ll show you how.

It’s possible to assign personalized voice commands to suggestions. If you’ve turned on Type to Siri (see step 7) to avoid speaking to your phone in public, typing those phrases may seem like a lot of work. So, add iOS’s Text Replacement feature into the mix.

By doing that, rather than type even short commands like “Text the boss”, you can have iOS replace stuff like “#txboss” with “Text ”. This requires some extra thought to prepare, but it means you can still perform complex actions with a few key taps instead of jumping to and around another app manually.

The “Suggestions in Look Up” item refers to rich results like the websites shown above. By turning it off, you may then see only Search Web and Manage Dictionaries commands.