How can I make Siri speak reminders (but not speak everything)?

January 13, 2019 9:32 AM

When I'm cooking, I want to be able to say, "Hey, Siri, remind me in ten minutes to turn off the pasta." And then 10 minutes later, I want Siri to say out loud, "Turn off the pasta." I don't want my iPhone to speak all notifications out loud -- just specific reminders I've asked for. This is proving surprisingly hard to do. What am I missing?

If I just say "Hey, Siri, remind me in ten minutes to X," Siri will create a non-spoken text reminder that pops up on my screen.

In theory I could use the iPhone's Voiceover feature, but my options seem to be:

• Set it to speak every single notification I get. No good, since I don't want all of my notifications spoken out loud.

• Set it to speak text that I tap on. No good, since the whole reason I want spoken reminders is so that I don't have to stop what I'm doing and handle my phone.

I am totally open to using a third-party app to do this, as long as I can activate vocally without having to touch my phone. (Presumably this would require an app with Siri integration?)

posted by yankeefog to Technology (5 answers total)

I'm about as big an Apple fan as they come, but this is one area where Amazon's Echo (Alexa) beats Siri. (Probably because the primary way you interact with it is voice/hearing instead of voice/sight)

An example:

Me: "Alexa, set a laundry timer for 20 minutes"

Echo: "20 minutes, starting now"

--20 minutes goes by--

Echo: [alarm sound] "Your laundry timer is finished."

I think the HomePod might do things closer to how you want. One of the recent HomePod updates was to allow for multiple overlapping timers, like Echo has.
posted by Wild_Eep at 10:21 AM on January 13, 2019 [3 favorites]

Seconding that I don’t know any way to make my iPhone do this, but my echo dot does it perfectly. I use it almost exclusively for timers.
posted by greermahoney at 10:40 AM on January 13, 2019

Google Home has this as well, just like Echo is what is says.
posted by k8t at 10:49 AM on January 13, 2019

Best answer: Since I am hopped up on coffee and like beating my head against the wall, I made you a Siri shortcut that does what you want.
It basically takes a couple voice inputs, then waits the requested amount of time before letting you know by speaking.

Try it out and make whatever changes you want to it. I've set it up so it requests a number of minutes - any other words here make Siri upset, just a number works fine.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/f7f2548a6b074097bcf1d8c486e28280
posted by drinkmaildave at 1:07 PM on January 13, 2019 [13 favorites]

Response by poster: Whoa, drinkmaildave-- that is above and beyond the call of AskMe duty. Thank you! It works great.

And thanks, Wild_Eep, Greermahoney, and k8t. If I get frustrated with the inherent limits of the iPhone (for example, since my phone only runs one Shortcut at a time, I can't use drinkmaildave's awesome solution to set multiple timers), I will definitely look into an Echo or Google Home.
posted by yankeefog at 9:23 AM on January 14, 2019