While I try to keep this mostly an iPad focused blog, I’ve been experimenting a bit lately with Siri on the iPhone 4S. Specifically, I’ve been looking into whether Siri can be used to activate TextExpander Touch shortcuts. I’ve found some success, but Siri seems to be even more tempermental than usual in this application. For example:
- Expansion only seems to work when the snippet is only thing dictated. In other words, expansion doesn’t seem to work when a snippet is included in the context of a longer bit of dictation.
- Triggers seem to work best with normal, full words, preferably those without homophones or subtle plurals. My initial tests attempts tried Merlin’s “Q” trick, but I couldn’t get it to work consistently.
- Many apps automatically capitalize at the beginning of a new line or after a period. Because expansions are caps sensitive, you may need capitalized and noncapitalized snippets for the same expansion.
The fact that you have to start and stop dictation before and after a snippet makes it mostly unusable for doing most expansions since you could type the trigger faster than coaxing Siri to understand your trigger syntax.
That said, I’m looking at the list of apps on the Smile website that support TextExpander differently now. Perhaps someone with greater nerd credentials than I can cook up some useful or fun Siri activated snippets. Anyone else been playing around with this?