Get your phone’s AI assistant to actually assist you

Your smartphone AI assistant can provide almost any factual information on demand, from the capital of France to the number of bananas in a banana bread. However, this app functions much more than answering random trivia questions. It can also organize your life, adjust your phone settings, control smart devices, play music, and more.

This guide will focus on how to use Siri on iOS and Google Assistant on Android to use these features. Other AI assistants such as Bixby for Samsung phones and Microsoft Cortana for iOS and Android offer similar features, so many instructions apply to them as well. However, this guide is not very helpful for the mobile version of Alexa. Although Amazon offers the Alexa app for iOS and Android, you need a smart speaker to take advantage of its capabilities.

To get started, launch your app. For Siri, hold the Home button, or on the iPhone X, hold the side button (the one on the right). To bring up the Google Assistant interface of Android native system, press and hold the Home button. Then get ready to get your phone AI tested.

Set reminders, alarm clocks and timers

If you have a real-life personal assistant, he can help you focus on tasks, remind you of what needs to be done, and let you complete tasks on time. Mobile AI does the same thing by making it easier to set reminders, alarms, and timers.

To make sure you don't forget the items on your to-do list, have your AI assistant alert you. Tell your phone, “Remind me…” or “Set reminder…” to create notes. Then decide whether you want to be alerted on a specific date and time or when you go to a specific location. Specify this trigger in your original command, or wait for Siri or Google Assistant to prompt you for this information. For example, you could say, “Remind me to buy flowers at 7 a.m. tomorrow” or “Remind me to buy flowers when I’m at the grocery store.”

For less specific tips, you can set an alarm without having to get into your phone clock app. Say to Siri or Google Assistant, "Set the alarm...", followed by the time, and optional date or day of the week.

About the alarm clock, your AI is also good at setting contactless timers quickly. So if you are cooking and don't want to get greasy fingerprints dirty on your phone or oven, tell your assistant, "Set the timer..." as many minutes, hours, or even days.

Adjust the phone settings

Of course, you can spend valuable time filtering the phone menu to adjust a small setting. Or you can save time and effort by having your AI partner do the job for you.

For example, voice commands can adjust your network connection immediately and easily. Simply tell Siri or Google Assistant, “Open Bluetooth,” “Off Wi-Fi,” or vice versa.

You can use the "Open Airplane Mode" command to cut off all phone communications - but be aware that this prevents Siri and Google Assistant from working, so you have to do this manually when you are ready to turn off Airplane Mode. To avoid interrupts in a less stringent way, activate Do Not Disturb mode by saying "On (or Off) Do Not Disturb," which mutes all incoming notifications.

If you are low on battery, try telling Siri, "Open Low Battery Mode", or command Google Assistant, "Open Power Saving Mode". This will enable your phone to minimize the amount of power it consumes. Another useful command is "Change Wallpaper", which will take you directly to the relevant screen on your phone.

You can also adjust screen brightness and audio volume through voice. Just say, “increase (or decrease) brightness” or “increase (or decrease) volume”.

These are not the only options for you to adjust the appearance and behavior of your phone. You can also jump directly to a specific settings page using convenient commands such as "Change Wallpaper".

Open the app

To quickly launch the app without browsing multiple lines of icons, let your assistant do this. Just say, "Open..." followed by the name of the app you want.

Voice commands can also perform simple in-app operations, but this only applies to certain programs. For example, if you say something like “Show cat videos on YouTube” or “Show routes to San Francisco,” your assistant can search for videos or map apps. You can also search for new apps you want to buy by saying "Open App Store" on iOS or "Open Play Store" on Android. In the store, iOS has an extra trick: say “Show me productivity apps” or “Show me entertainment apps” to jump directly to any given category.

One of the especially useful applications for voice commands is your camera. To take hands-free photos with the front camera, say "take a photo"; to take a photo with the rear camera, say "take a selfie." On Android (but not on iOS), you can also use voice commands to record images through specific apps such as Instagram or Snapchat.

Memories Photos

When it comes to cameras, both Siri and Google Assistant can bring up your photos from the Photos app on iOS or the Google Photos app on Android, respectively. Both of these apps allow you to search for specific people or places in your photo album. Your assistant will reward specificity. For example, try asking, “Show me photos of my mother from New York” or “Show me photos of my mother”, replacing the search term with the place or person you actually want to look for.

However, the assistant won't automatically know what your friends and family look like, so you have to do some preparation before you successfully search for a specific person. Spend some time browsing some albums to mark people. Once it connects the name to the image, AI can find the same face in other photos. To complete this task in photos on iOS, go to Albums >People; In Google Photos on Android, click the search bar to view and confirm suggested faces.

In addition to people and places, you can also search for images containing objects and scene types (such as sunsets). Google Assistant can even find colors. Just make sure you are saying "Show me my photos about [search terms]". Otherwise, the assistant will expand its search to include the network and you will get more results than you expected.

Play music

Although we have discussed voice commands related to the app, we are providing our own section for the audio app as you can issue more specific commands about what you want to hear. Tell your AI assistant, “play music of…” followed by an artist, album, song, playlist or music genre. The Assistant will then launch your request in a specific music app: Music for iOS and Google Play Music for Android.

The two default apps have different versions, one free and one subscription-only. So if you don't pay for your app, you'll find that your choices are limited to songs you already have. Alternatively, Android users who are also Spotify’s premium subscription users have another option – add “on Spotify” at the end of the command to play the selection you requested through the app instead of the default app. Unfortunately, this trick doesn't work on iOS.

After the music starts playing, you can also browse various songs. Try voice commands such as "Next Song" or "Previous Song" or adjust the volume as described previously.

Contact contact person

Tell the digital assistant to "call," "sMS," or "email" one of your contacts, pretending you have a real-life assistant. If the AI ​​can’t tell which contact you are referring to, it will provide a list of potential friends for you to choose from.

If you choose to make a call, your phone will make a call immediately, but for text messages, you must dictate or type the text message before the AI ​​sends it. In fact, you can include scripts for text messages in the original command. For example, “Tell Dad I’ll be five minutes late” adds that text to your latest conversation with your dad.

Email voice commands work similarly to text messages. Once you say you want to send an email to So-and-so, a new message will appear in the default email app, allowing you to use voice or type the actual text of the message.

Control your smart home

Siri and Google Assistant can control some (but not all) smart home devices. This means you need to check if your device is compatible with your specific phone AI. Siri users should view a list of this smart home technology, while Google Assistant users can view this list of smart devices.

When you set up your smart home, you can issue commands such as "turn off the lights", "reduce the temperature", and "play some music on my TV", although the last command requires a Chromecast. In fact, there are too many potential commands listed here, so please customize your instructions based on the specific product you have installed. Note that the application of your smart device, such as a Philips Hue light or Nest video doorbell, can provide more control than voice commands.

In addition to these fine-grained commands, you can combine multiple operations into a single instruction. For example, when you say “before bed”, a range of smart devices may lower the temperature of the house and turn off the lights so you can go to bed directly. Siri calls these sequences a scene, while Google Assistant calls them routines.

Request news updates

Stay up to date on the latest events--no need to browse the Internet by yourself. A simple “What’s the news?” command will tell your AI assistant to bring up the latest headlines. You can also get more specific answers by asking “What is news about…” followed by topics (such as “Hurricanes”), categories (such as “Technology”), or geographic area.

If you like sports news, your AI assistant can tell you the latest results. Ask loudly for any recent or ongoing match scores instead of searching the web or scrolling through sports apps.

Apart from articles, your AI assistant can also play short news podcasts for you. Try saying “tell me the news” followed by the name of the news organization, such as NPR, CNN, ESPN, Bloomberg, or The Washington Post. All of these publications offer short audio summary of the latest news. You can try it out and see which ones are best for you.

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