The iOS Academy: How To Blog With Siri
by Matthew Sims
October 26, 2011
Hello and welcome to the iOS Academy, our new daily series that aims to help you take full advantage of your iDevices.
Today, we're going to make blogging easier with our favorite artificial intelligence, Siri. Despite Siri not having a blogging feature built in from the start you'll be surprised at how easy it is providing you use the proper blogging platforms to start sharing your thoughts via voice to text.
The idea is simple, Siri can email on your behalf using its speech to text input system. The key is adding the specific email address attached to your blog into contacts. This works with quite a few blogging platforms, the most popular being: Blogger, Live Journal, Posterous, Square Space, Tumblr, and WordPress.
All you have to do is find out what your specific blog's email address is. To do so click on your blog provider's link above and it will take you to their how-to page explaining how to find the blog's address. If your platform is not included above simply search for "post by email" on your provider's support or help page.
For example if you're a Tumblr user you'll want to click your blog's name next to the word dashboard, then just scroll down till you see the words "Post by email" and there is your blog's specific email to the right.
Now once you've saved the email into your contacts just tell Siri to "email message to Tumblr" it will then ask you the subject, which will be the title of the blog post you are creating. Next Siri will ask "What would you like the email to say?" and that will be the content put in the body of the blog post.
Here are a few tips that may save you some time. First, if you are using Tumblr I would recommend naming it something else or spelling it properly (tumbler) so that Siri will actually understand the contact's name. Also, Siri sometimes has trouble with punctuation so ending your thoughts with the words "period," "exclamation point," and "question mark" are recommended.
So there you have it, the first of what we hope to be many iOS Academy how-to articles. If you have any questions related to this particular solution, or suggestions, make sure to let me know.
