If you’re fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem you already use Siri on your iPhone, though probably not so much on your iPad (based on usage statistics). You might even use it with your Apple Watch, though talking to your watch does have a slight air of “Dick Tracy” to it, so some people are too self-conscious to opt for that path to the helpful voice-based assistant.
With the released of MacOS X 10.12 “Sierra”, Apple has finally brought Siri to Apple desktop and laptop systems too, though it’s not quite as fully capable as far as we can tell. Still, for an easy way to navigate and submit basic queries, Siri can’t be beat, whether it’s “weather in shanghai?” or “time in london?” or “when do the rockies next play?”.
But you have to enable Siri for it to be ready to work!
To start, go to System Preferences… and find the swanky new Siri button:
Click on it and you’ll be at the Siri system preference (no surprise there, right?)
Notice on the left the “Enable Siri” checkbox. Make sure it’s checked to ensure that Siri can listen to you!
Now where we have had the most problem is finding a functional keyboard shortcut. There are a number of choices, as you can see if you click:
You might have better luck, but my suspicion is that it’s something that needs some tweaking on Apple’s part. Fortunately, once you have Siri running, you can also have it show up in the menu bar by checking the logically labelled “Show Siri in menu bar” option:
What you can’t do is have it wake up to “hey siri” like you can on your iOS 10 device. Too bad, that’s darn handy!
Once it’s running, we’re also finding that it’s a bit less entertaining than the mobile version, as shown:
We do encourage you to ask Siri what she can do for you, however:
That’s it. Now you have Siri on your MacOS X system. Good luck with it!
Tip: Apple has a good Siri info page too, though it’s more focused on the iOS version of the utility. Check it out at Apple.com
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