Timers and reminders
December 6, 2015 at 12:47 PM by Dr. Drang
Daniel Jalkut wrote a nice piece today on Siri’s overly cute responses to setting short-duration timers. He’s right, responses like “Remember, a watched iPhone never boils” get old fast. It’s an example of Apple not thinking through how people might use their products. A jokey response once in a while is fun, but it wears thin when you hear the same damned thing every day.
Even though I also use Siri to set short-duration prompts quite often, I’ve never run into this annoying behavior. Two reasons:
I have Siri set to give audible responses in hands-free mode only. I find it weird enough to be talking to my little computer. I don’t want it talking back except when absolutely necessary, like when I’m driving.
I don’t use timers for short-duration prompts, I use reminders. As I said in that post, I do this because I like having a specific reminder message appear when the time is up, and because the iPhone doesn’t allow multiple timers running simultaneously.
The downside of using reminders instead of timers is that my Reminders app gets loaded with “Check the grill” entries. That doesn’t bother me, because completed reminders are normally hidden, and I never go back to look at them.
Except when I need to take a screenshot.
