{"id":51592,"date":"2026-04-15T13:36:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=51592"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T17:46:10","slug":"dictating-literal-reminders-to-my-apple-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/15\/dictating-literal-reminders-to-my-apple-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"Dictating Literal Reminders to My Apple Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading about the Pebble Index<\/a> motivated to keep looking for a better way to dictate reminders using my Apple Watch. Ideally, I would press a button, immediately begin speaking, and the literal text of what I said would appear in OmniFocus. This should work when offline.<\/p>\n\n

My watch doesn’t have an action button, so the next best thing is a complication. I can’t use the OmniFocus complication because I’m not running OmniFocus on my watch. It just doesn’t reliably sync in the background, and even if I manually trigger a foreground sync it takes a long time and doesn’t always complete successfully. Fortunately, if I add a reminder on the watch, OmniFocus on my phone will reliably import it.<\/p>\n\n

Shortcuts can have complications, so I looked into making a shortcut that could create reminders from speech. I had trouble figuring out how to make the shortcut, but Edward Munn<\/a> showed how to set it up with Record audio ‣ Transcribe ‣ Add New Reminder<\/strong>. Then I discovered that Dictate text ‣ Add New Reminder<\/strong> is better because you don’t have to press a button to stop recording and also you can see the text being transcribed as you speak. The challenge was getting the shortcut to sync to the watch. Sometimes this doesn’t happen automatically, so you have to select Show on Apple Watch<\/strong>. Sometimes that doesn’t work right away and you have to toggle it a few times. Sometimes a formerly visible shortcut disappears and you have to select that option again. There’s no way to see at a glance from your iPhone or Mac which shortcuts are set to sync to the watch.<\/p>\n\n

Running shortcuts via a complication turns out not to be ideal. After tapping the icon, you have to tap a second Run<\/strong> button to confirm. Then it opens the list of Shortcuts and eventually runs the shortcut and is ready to record. This sometimes took 10 or more seconds on my Apple Watch SE before I could begin speaking. With my new SE 3, it takes 2–3 seconds, which still feels like a long time.<\/p>\n\n

It also works to invoke the shortcut via Siri, and this can be faster (if Siri responds and understands me the first time). With Siri, there’s no Run<\/strong> button to tap, nor shortcut to open: it just runs the whole process as a text conversation in the Siri interface. My shortcut is called “Dictate Reminder,” and I have to be careful to say exactly that. If I say “Dictate a reminder” or “Make a reminder,” it will invoke the standard Siri interface for creating reminders, which is not what I want because it’s non-literal. It will try to parse out times, places, and other fragments that it recognizes and make a mess of things. Sometimes making a new reminder with Siri will edit (and mess up) the previously<\/em> created reminder. In the car, it’s better to use the complication or to press the digital crown; if I just say “Hey Siri, dictate reminder,” CarPlay will step in and steal the command from the watch but not know how to run the shortcut.<\/p>\n\n

The shortcut works, but I’m not totally happy with it for a few reasons. First, it still feels slow. It’s so much more convenient to just ask Siri to create a reminder. So I tend to do that when the watch is online and when I think what I’m going to say won’t confuse Siri’s parser. Second, it takes more steps to edit the reminder if it wasn’t transcribed properly or if I want to add more text to it.<\/p>\n\n

Instead of the shortcut complication, sometimes it seems better to do it old-school using the Reminders complication. In the worst case, this requires 4 taps (complication, Add Reminder<\/strong>, microphone button, Done<\/strong> button), but it responds more quickly than the shortcut. watchOS remembers the input method, so I can often skip tapping the microphone button, and if I’m creating a series of reminders I’ll already be in the Reminders app so I can skip the complication button, too. It’s nice to be entering directly into the Reminders app so that I edit the text.<\/p>\n\n

A problem with using the complication is that it opens Reminders to the Today<\/strong> view. This means that tapping Add Reminder<\/strong> will create the reminder with a due date. It’s easier to remove the date later than to prevent it from being attached on creation. I wrote a script<\/a> to clear the date in OmniFocus.<\/p>\n\n

Finally, I found my favorite method of dictating reminders: the New Reminder<\/strong> widget<\/em>. It’s not directly on the home screen, so it seems like it’s going to be slower, but I can pin this to the top of the list and then quickly swipe up and tap it. It jumps right into the dictation screen, faster than when using the complication, and it doesn’t<\/em> create the reminder under Today<\/strong>. This seems to be the best way except for when I need to be hands-free, in which case I use Siri to run the shortcut.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n