Siri Works Really Well With Reminders — Especially on HomePod

It’s nothing new that Apple’s own first-party apps get special placement within the iOS ecosystem, and Reminders is one of the most obvious examples of this. While Apple added SiriKit a few years ago to allow other apps to receive Siri commands, there’s no way to make another app your default reminders app, requiring you to always add “using” or “in” to your Siri commands.

In other words, if you call out to Siri asking it to “Remember” something or “Add reminder,” that’s going to go into the Reminders app by default. On the other hand, if you want to add a task to Things, you have to add “Using Things” to either the front or end of your request. This gets tiresome pretty quickly, to the point where I found that I use Siri far less to add reminders to other apps. Even when I was using Things or OmniFocus as my primary task managers, I’d channel all of my Siri-created reminders through the Reminders app and let the third-party apps import them from there.

But with Apple’s own Reminders app, the Siri integration goes even deeper. You can add reminders to specific lists, set location-based reminders, have Siri read off your reminders in various ways, mark them as completed, or even delete them. Here are just a few of the things you can tell Siri to do with your reminders:

• “Hey Siri, remind me to take out the trash today at 6 p.m.”
• “Hey Siri, remind me to turn off the sprinkler when I get home.”
• “Hey Siri, add milk to my Grocery List”
• “Hey Siri, what do I have to do today?”
• “Hey Siri, what’s on my personal list?”
• “Hey Siri, what’s my personal list look like for today?”
• “Hey Siri, mark laundry as complete.”
• “Hey Siri, delete chocolate from my grocery list.”

Best of all, these all work great from HomePod as well, allowing you to quickly add things you need to buy while you’re actually standing in your kitchen staring into an empty refrigerator, or simply have Siri give you a morning briefing of your daily task list.