My girlfriend can just say “hey siri” and her phone wakes up and is ready for voice input. Mine just sits stupidly off when I try that, though. how do I turn on Hey Siri on my iPhone 6s running iOS 9?
First off, don’t worry, your girlfriend doesn’t have a better Apple iPhone than you do! All you need to do is enable what Apple calls the “Hey Siri” feature. But before I show you how to do that, a brief word on privacy because that’s pretty important in this particular instance…
The issue is that once you enable the Hey Siri feature, your iPhone has been granted permission to listen to what’s going on around it at all times. Daytime, nighttime, the microphone is on and it’s processing the sounds it hears. Are you ready to have that level of tracking in your daily life? Might make you think twice about where you take your phone!
Still, Apple assures us that there are no privacy implications, that it’s not storing any of the audio data, and that it’s not even being sent to Apple for processing. But still, hmmm.
You still want to enable this feature? Okay, here’s how ya do it…
Go into the Settings app and find General:
You can see it near the bottom in the above screenshot.
Tap on “General” and look for “Siri” about half-way down:
Tap on “Siri” and you’ll see the configuration and setting options for the voice assistant:
You’ll immediately notice that I have mine set up for the Australian female voice. She’s a right nice Sheila!
More importantly for this task, however, is that the switch associated with Allow “Hey Siri” isn’t enabled.
Tap on it to enable it.
This is best done in a relatively quiet environment as you’ll be offering up voice samples to the device.
Ready? Tap on “Set Up Now” to get Hey Siri up and running!
Don’t touch the phone, don’t push any buttons, just talk.
Say, as you might imagine, “Hey Siri”. Actually, you’ll get to say that a few times, then you’ll be asked for a few common phrases:
And one more:
Almost done. Say “Hey Siri, it’s me.” and you should see this screen:
That’s it. Now your phone is as smart as your girlfriend’s phone. Try it. Lock your phone so that the screen is completely off and say “Hey siri!”…
Got it! Nicely done. Now about Siri… 🙂
You know I saw it on my IPhone 6 one day and didn’t have time to mess with it. Went to set it up today and it was gone!