The five best voice commands for Cortana and Siri

Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are a bit like virtual personal assistants. They’re able to help you manage your phone, diary and even answer questions for you. Best of all, you can instruct them with your voice!

They work using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS).

There are a number of questions you can ask Siri and Cortana – here are our favourites!

“Call…”

Let’s say you wanted to call your Dad. To save you the time of tapping the ‘phone icon’ and scrolling through your contacts list, you can simply tell Siri or Cortana to ‘call Dad’. If you wanted to FaceTime your Dad, you’d simply say ‘FaceTime Dad’. It really is that simple!

“Reply…”

If you receive a text message and don’t want to type it out, you can tell Siri or Cortana to respond in a particular way. Simply say ‘reply…’, followed by whatever you’d like Siri or Cortana to write.

“Show me directions from…to…”

If you’re out and about and feeling lost, then Siri or Cortana could be your savior! Simply say ‘show me directions from’, mentioning your current location and the destination you want.

“What’s the weather like in…?”

Planning a family trip and need to find out what the weather’s like in a particular destination? Why not ask your virtual personal assistant?

“How’s my schedule looking…?”

One of the reasons Siri and Cortana are so useful is that they can help you plan your day. If you’re concerned about your schedule, why not ask your virtual PA to clarify things for you?

There you go – our five favourite voice commands to make the most of Siri and Cortana. Got a question you want to ask us? Simply post in the comment section below.