{"id":18992,"date":"2017-09-25T15:05:50","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T19:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=18992"},"modified":"2024-05-28T09:35:14","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T13:35:14","slug":"omnifocus-and-siri-on-ios-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/25\/omnifocus-and-siri-on-ios-11\/","title":{"rendered":"OmniFocus and Siri on iOS 11"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/reviews\/omnifocus-for-ios-11-adds-extensive-drag-and-drop-and-siri-support\/\">Ryan Christoffel<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/reviews\/omnifocus-for-ios-11-adds-extensive-drag-and-drop-and-siri-support\/\"><p>In iOS 11, Siri can fulfill all kinds of OmniFocus-related requests. Many of these will be similar commands to what you might use for Reminders, only with &lsquo;in OmniFocus&rsquo; added to the end. For example, &ldquo;Add &lsquo;Write the history essay&rsquo; to my School list in OmniFocus.&rdquo; There are three main areas of functionality:<\/p><ul><li>Task creation: This includes the ability to add tasks to certain projects and create time or location-based reminders. You can even create a new project entirely.<\/li><li>Task completion: Simply put, you can mark items as complete with your voice.<\/li><li>Searching: This allows Siri to display a visual representation of different lists of tasks, such as ones due today, ones created today, or all tasks belonging to a certain project.<\/li><\/ul><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>I went to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.omnigroup.com\/blog\/testing-sirikit-for-ios-11-and-omnifocus\">try these<\/a> and found that the new Siri features didn&rsquo;t work because I was using OmniFocus 2.19.1, the last version supported by the &ldquo;legacy support edition.&rdquo; The current version is 2.21.1, but to get it I needed to <a href=\"https:\/\/support.omnigroup.com\/of2-universal-comparison\/\">download the &ldquo;universal&rdquo; version of app<\/a>. Then I went to Preferences &gt; Synchronization &gt; Show Sync Details&#8230; &gt; Unregister to prevent the old version of the app from bogging down syncing.<\/p>\n\n<p>My primary concern is being able to dictate longish notes and have them show up as new tasks in OmniFocus. Previously, the best way I found to do this was to say &ldquo;Make a reminder.&rdquo; Then Siri would prompt me for the text, and I could dictate a complete sentence. This was much better than the &ldquo;Add ___ to my reminder&rsquo;s list&rdquo; formulation. The problem with both of these, though, is that Siri would look for anything in the text that sounded like a day or a time, remove those words, and then try to stick them into the reminder&rsquo;s due date. So it would mangle what I said and then assign an unwanted date.<\/p>\n\n<p>Now, I can say &ldquo;Add a task in OmniFocus.&rdquo; This seems to bypass the unwanted parsing, and it also saves a step by creating the task directly in OmniFocus instead of using the shared Reminders list, which sometimes led to duplicates being imported.<\/p>\n\n<p>There are still some problems, though. Sometimes, when I say &ldquo;Add a task in OmniFocus&rdquo; it will <em>not<\/em> go into the mode where it lets me dictate. Instead, Siri will say something like &ldquo;I found 25 reminders&rdquo; and then show a list of some OmniFocus tasks. I have no idea why this happens since the Siri screen shows that it understood what I had said.<\/p>\n\n<p>Also, the length limit for OmniFocus seems to be even shorter than for Reminders. After a sentence, or even a long clause, even if I&rsquo;m careful not to pause, Siri will decide she&rsquo;s done listening, truncate my task, and throw away everything else I said.<\/p>\n\n<p>This can be avoided by manually creating a new task in OmniFocus and tapping the microphone button. Then I can say as much as I want. But, as far as I know, there&rsquo;s no way to initiate this via Siri.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously: <a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/24\/adventures-in-siri-failures-reminders-edition\/\">Adventures in Siri Failures: Reminders Edition<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>Update (2017-09-26): <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Gok\/status\/912420732818292738\">Gok<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Gok\/status\/912420732818292738\">\n<p>You can use hold-to-talk to prevent recording from stopping. Hold down the Siri button (hardware or software) until you&rsquo;re done.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>However, I mostly use this feature in the car, where I don&rsquo;t want to have to hold down the button.<\/p>\n\n<p id=\"omnifocus-and-siri-on-ios-11-update-2024-05-28\">Update (2024-05-28): I&rsquo;m now using iOS 17, and &ldquo;Add a task in OmniFocus.&rdquo; does <em>not<\/em> bypass the unwanted parsing. There does not seem to be a way to make a task with literal text.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ryan Christoffel: In iOS 11, Siri can fulfill all kinds of OmniFocus-related requests. Many of these will be similar commands to what you might use for Reminders, only with &lsquo;in OmniFocus&rsquo; added to the end. For example, &ldquo;Add &lsquo;Write the history essay&rsquo; to my School list in OmniFocus.&rdquo; There are three main areas of functionality:Task [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2024-05-28T13:35:17Z","apple_news_api_id":"3bdafd88-7039-4012-a277-d62856e4923c","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2024-05-28T13:35:17Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AO9r9iHA5QBKid9YoVuSSPA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[31,1472,26,526,247],"class_list":["post-18992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-ios","tag-ios-11","tag-iosapp","tag-omnifocus","tag-siri"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18992"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43400,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18992\/revisions\/43400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}