
Remember The Milk can sync with your iPhone calendar - hopeless
http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2011/10/we-taught-siri-to-add-tasks-to-remember-the-milk/
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bbhacker
If I understand correctly, the have taught Siri nothing. What you see is task
list synchronization between the iPhone and RTM.

You talk to Siri -> Siri creates a task -> Task is synced to RTM

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danilocampos
This comment demonstrates everything that has come to exhaust me about Hacker
News.

There are myriad things to praise about this community, to be certain, but the
only place with a bigger stick up its collective ass is Wikipedia.

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albemuth
I don't think this applies for this comment, I mean, the title suggests
teaching something to an AI, which in the case of Siri would open a lot of
very interesting options, I'm sure I'm not the only one who expected something
along those lines and was disappointed. "RTM Siri setup instructions" is a
less attractive title though.

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mikeash
I've seen the word "teach" used to talk about setting up or programming a
computer on many occasions before. It's completely appropriate. I can see why
you'd be disappointed but that's not a reason to complain.

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roc
The headline would be fine in a magazine article or a tech-light site like
Lifehacker.

But, because of Siri's architecture, telling _a forum of hackers_ that you've
"taught it" to do something is a wildly different thing.

Hackers click that headline because they're interested in the possibility
space where you can integrate arbitrary third party apps.

And when they discover that your headline is a semantic game --that the
implicit promise of the headline is a lie-- I don't know how you could expect
anything other than complaints.

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jpendry
I upvoted because I completely agree.

But then I thought about it, and isn't this also an example of a hack in it's
purest sense?

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ajpatel
Isn't the problem with their hack though that it can only work for ONE
calendar? Whichever one you set as the default is going to be the one service
that Siri can interact with.

So if RTM is set as your default calendar, then all your Siri reminders go
into your RTM calendar, which may not be your actual calendar of course.

And getting other services to use this same hack will result in users having
to choose one service they prioritize over all others because you can only
have one calendar.

Of course I am an Android guy and don't really know how Siri and all this is
working - I'm just guessing based on the instructions provided at RTM's site
on how to get this to work...

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paul9290
Maybe they could have used the SMS hack to interface with Siri too?

As of now via Siri I can update Twitter and Facebook by telling Siri, "Text
Facebook," or "Text Twitter." In my contacts i created a Facebook contact with
my carrier's FB short code, as well created a Twitter contact with it's short
code.

This same hack possibly could be applied to Evernote, ping.fm, a wake up call
service (random example) & other services that have a SMS component?

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joelhaasnoot
Sounds like an expensive plan for your users. Then again, if you've got an
iPhone 4s you probably have the cash I guess.

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paul9290
Expensive....possibly depending where you live?

Most people in the US have unlimited text plans. Either they are built into
their monthly bill (Sprint unlimited everything $80 a month) or subscribers
pay an additional fee on top their voice/data bill for unlimited SMS.

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joelhaasnoot
True, it's a 10 euro addon here for 1000 "unlimited" messages, dropping now
however because data usage has grown massively, while the texting cash cow
dropped (Whatsapp and BBM).

It's still a bad solution for the problem as a whole.

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BrandonM
In the US unlimited messaging typically means just that. And thankfully so,
because about a year ago my teenage brother was on my plan and managed to
send/receive 16,000 texts in a single month.

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jjcm
16,000 is a large number, but it's not all that surprising. I find myself
having multiple conversations at once via text often times, and will spurt out
batches of around 100 texts at a time within the course of 5 minutes or so.
Teenagers with a social life far more developed than my own will without a
doubt hit those numbers multiple times a day.

I think a lot of this is because of the change in mindset of texting. Early
on, it used to be a way to convey precise pieces of information. Now it's
conversational. People send texts with "um" as the entire message.

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hopeless
A similar approach (setting up your own CalDav server) might work for lots of
other todo/reminder sites. Furthermore, I wonder if there are any other types
of services which could be integrated with Siri in this manner

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robmcm
Such as being able to tweet by sending an SMS to twitter.

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LiveTheDream
This would work (twitter via SMS) just by adding the twitter shortcode to your
contacts. I was surprised that Siri doesn't support twitter natively.

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marknutter
Does anyone know exactly what API's there are for accessing Siri, or is it
pretty locked down at this point?

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rjvir
They aren't accessing any API's - Siri is still pretty locked down at this
point, and will be for a while. All this does is sync your Calender with
Remember the Milk, which never actually interacts with Siri.

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hartror
Awesome! I was just getting annoyed about this yesterday and wishing there was
a solution.

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seanMeverett
Love this hack, it's the reason I joined HN, to learn about things exactly
like this. My question is, when Apple opens the API, are we going to see Siri
games?

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robjohnson
I can see many developers moving towards this idea of integrating Siri APIs
into their apps.

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jasonlotito
Could you set up an email for your app, and allow messages to be sent to your
app from siri? Instead of posting to twitter directly, you send something via
Siri to your contact, Twitter, which is an email that will post to twitter?

Basically, makes email act as the API.

Edit: Just realized twitter supports SMS (for a long time, didn't support
Canada, at least, from what I remember).

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wofser
What would be really cool is to make reminders that reminds you when you are
in a special area.

For example:

When I am close to a special shop it reminds me to get that special battery
that only them have.

When I get home it reminds me to do something in my home, take out the trash
for example.

When I visit a friend I get a reminder about something I should inform him of.

Location-based notifiers instead of time-based (or a combination so it would
not remind me to go to the store nearby in the middle of the night and its
closed).

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sharkman
it's in iPhone 4S, but it drains your battery like crazy

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jaxn
Why do you say it drains your battery like crazy? I am not saying it doesn't,
but I haven't noticed it.

Doesn't iOS now have a location service that will update apps of your location
without running the app constantly in the background?

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glhaynes
Yeah - lots of people are saying they're having worse battery performance on
the 4S or iOS 5 (lots of people aren't, too), and then lots of those people
are claiming lots of different things such as turning off various features
(and also not doing anything different at all!) has dramatically helped. In
other words, essentially no science is being done and no one to my knowledge
can say anything definitively yet, but lots of folk remedies are being
tweeted. Assuming there's not a bug in the geofencing code, it shouldn't use
too much more battery at all because it only goes out to the GPS when
available cell towers—which are being constantly communicated with
anyway—change.

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hartror
I am getting way better battery performance that I was getting on my 2.5yo 3G
with iOS4 that I upgraded from so I am yet have an issue with it.

