Did you know you can customize the name Siri calls you by?
Did you know your iPhone can guide you through the length for which you ought to be washing your hands? (An important COVID-19 measure)
Did you know your iPhone has been tracking your every movement? It knows every location you’ve ever set the sole of your feet. If someone were to grab your phone, they could tell you went to that place you promised never to go to.
These and many others are what your iPhone can do.
Keep reading to discover other exciting facts about your beloved Apple product.
1. Wash your hands correctly with your iPhone
During the pandemic, one point of worry for most people was how long they needed to wash their hands. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommended 20 seconds, but it was hard to keep track of this time. So, Apple devised a plan. They added timed music to your phone, which played for the recommended duration of wash (20 seconds).
When you want to wash your hands, just tell Siri to “Play Washing Hands Music.” You can then follow the song play to wash your hands. Once the song ends, you know it’s time to stop washing.
How to set up this feature:
- Click the Shortcuts app
- Hit the Washing Hands Music shortcut to activate it
- Once you add the shortcut, allow the shortcut to use the Apple Music App
- That should do it
2. Location Tracker
Unfortunately, that iPhone 11 Pro Max has been tracking your every movement since you copped it. I know this sounds like a privacy invasion, but I guess Apple must have a reason for building the Location service that way.
Anyways, to see all the places you’ve traveled with your iPhone, follow these steps.
How to access this feature:
- Go to settings
- Scroll down to privacy
- Click location services
- Go to system services, and hit the “frequent locations” button.
You will see the history of every place you’ve been with your phone.
3. Have Siri call you by a nickname
Every time you call out to Siri, you call it by its nickname, “SIRI.” Why not let the app return the favor?
Naturally, Siri is designed to call you by the name on your Apple ID. But that may be too long and formal. That’s why Apple lets you customize the app to call you by a nickname.
How to activate this feature:
- Say “Hey Siri” as usual
- Once the voice app responds, say to the speaker, “Call me by a nickname.”
- Siri will ask you what you would like to be called.
- Tell it the name you would like to be called
- Siri will confirm the pronunciation and then ask you to save the changes!
- Voila
Unless your speaker is bad or something is wrong with your App configuration, Siri should respond with your nickname next time you try to speak with it. Mind you, if your speaker is bad or other things are wrong with your iPhone, visit this NiceLocal electronics repair page. It contains many iPhone repair plugs near you. Meanwhile, for the iPhone repair specialists reading this blog, the Nicelocal platform is also a good place to advertize your business to the world.
4. Neat arrangement of your Note content
Did you know your iPhone can automatically arrange your list for you in the Note App?
Say you want to create a list of items to do for the day. Normally, you would write the list with the serial numbers in front of each item. Then you’ll probably space the serial number from the first letter of each item.
Well, instead of going through that stress, you can let the iPhone system do the job for you.
Just simply add the right serial numbers to each item, then select the entire content. After that, swipe each item to the left as many times as you want to neatly arrange the whole piece.
5. Send Photos with Siri
Traditionally, it was impossible to send photos with the voice app. If you tried with up to IOS 14, you might not be able to use SIRI to send images.
If you tried, here’s what you would have gotten as a response:
“Sorry I can’t send image for you”
However, with the latest IOS 15, you can now send images with Siri.
How to activate this feature:
- Go to any image you want to send in the Photos app
- Say “Hey Siri!” as usual. Then follow up with “Send this photo to XYZ!”
- Siri prepares to send the photo. But if you’d like to add a caption, you can do that before sending.
- Your photo is sent immediately
6. Drag and drop images, texts, web content
In older IOS versions, if you wanted to send a message you sent to someone to someone else, you would need to copy and paste the message on the new recipient’s SMS space. Also, if you needed to attach an image to a message, file, or the Note page, you would need to copy and paste it.
Things are different on the latest IOS design. You no longer need to go through all that stress to copy and paste content. Simply drag and drop anything you want anywhere.
How to activate this feature:
If you want to send an already-existing message to a new recipient, go to the old message, hold and drag the message, then drop it in the SMS space of the new recipient.
To send images, simply hold and drag the picture from the Photos App, then drop it in the SMS space of the recipient, in your Note, or another folder in Files.
Say you’re browsing on Safari, and you stumble on a photo you like. Instead of saving the photo first, simply hold and drag it anywhere you want on the phone – to the download folder in files, to your Notes, to a contact on Skype.
If you want to drag multiple images, simply mark the images as part of the list.
7. Hold the Mute button to Hold calls
One of the annoying parts of being an iPhone user is the inability to hold calls or see where the ‘Hold’ button is. Apple’s caller page design has been so strange for users that one can only see the hold button when multiple calls are coming in at once.
You will never see the button when you’re on a single call. It can be so annoying, especially when you need to say something to someone around you and don’t want the person on the phone to hear about it.
Now, let me drop a shocker on you.
Would you believe that the Hold button has been hiding in plain sight all along? I mean, like it’s been right there on the caller page all this while.
Yes, that’s right.
The button is just directly below the Mute button on the caller page.
How to activate this feature:
It’s pretty simple to hold a call (most of us just didn’t know all these years). To hold a call, simply hold the Mute button for a few seconds, and that’s it. Your call is on ‘Hold.’ No muss, No fuss.
- Easily scan and extract text from images
Apple’s IOS 15 now makes it extremely easy to scan and extract the texts in images. This feature, aided by the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, allows you to scan a photo or a screenshot and then turn the text on the image into actual text you can copy and edit.
Don’t you think that’s great?
How to activate this feature:
- Open the Photos App
- Find a photo with text (maybe a photo of your college varsity jacket)
- Tap and hold down on the text in the image you’ll like to grab
- Keep holding until it’s selected
- Once that happens, a menu pops up for you to drag and grab (copy) the texts.
You can extend this courtesy to images you find online, too.
- Automatically disable Face ID
When you lose your iPhone, say at a party, Siri does a miraculous job of temporarily disabling your Face ID.
This is done to prevent anyone who finds the phone from hacking through your Face ID.
Normally, when someone finds a lost phone, they may ask Siri, ‘Hey, whose phone is this?’ to know who the phone belongs to before deciding whether to abscond with it or return it to the rightful owner.
Unfortunately for them, when you ask Siri this, the app automatically zones into the Face ID disability mode, rendering FACE ID inactive for the time being.
To open the phone after this, that person will need the passcode, which is tougher to crack than a regular Face ID.
Conclusion
There is so much your iPhone can do, which you probably haven’t heard of before. The IOS 15 has even opened up many more opportunities. Take a quick tour of your phone today to discover many more gems.