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How to give your friends nicknames on Siri

P

pezasied182

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 3, 2011
293
8
So I wasn't aware if people already knew that you can give contacts any nickname you want on Siri. It's really easy to do, just go to contacts, select the contact you want to give the nickname to, edit, add field, nickname and you're done. From now on, you can refer to this person as either their nickname or their actual name and Siri will register it as that contact, exactly like how "mother" "brother" etc work, except it can be any word you want. (I call my girlfriend Beans, for example.)

Trying to give people nicknames within Siri (telling it X is my Y) limits it to family names and relationships, and won't allow you to give personalized names.
 
doesn't work!

i can call my dad batman for example ..

but if i set my mother in law to mother in law - it wouldn't of called.
 
Last edited:
Under their address book card, go into edit mode and add a new field, there is one called nicknames. Siri can use that. I have a friend named Matt that we call "Moose" and I've been using it with Siri just fine using this method.
 
It does work if you edit the contacts nickname in the contacts app exactly how AML225 and I said. It's kinda fun to give people nicknames on it.
 
musio said:
Can you have multiple nicknames?
Click to expand...

In the contacts app, you can only give a person one nickname. Though, you can set a relationship name (like brother, father, etc) for a person and a nickname. I can call my girlfriend by saying either girlfriend, beans, or Brianna.
 
This works! Great tip!

Siri was having a hard time recognizing the name of my company, so I used nicknames instead to make it simpler. Worked like a charm.
 
pezasied182 said:
So I wasn't aware if people already knew that you can give contacts any nickname you want on Siri. It's really easy to do, just go to contacts, select the contact you want to give the nickname to, edit, add field, nickname and you're done. From now on, you can refer to this person as either their nickname or their actual name and Siri will register it as that contact, exactly like how "mother" "brother" etc work, except it can be any word you want. (I call my girlfriend Beans, for example.)

Trying to give people nicknames within Siri (telling it X is my Y) limits it to family names and relationships, and won't allow you to give personalized names.
Click to expand...

Stumbled upon this last night. Pretty sweet stuff.
 
pezasied182 said:
In the contacts app, you can only give a person one nickname. Though, you can set a relationship name (like brother, father, etc) for a person and a nickname. I can call my girlfriend by saying either girlfriend, beans, or Brianna.
Click to expand...
I'm not going to tell you what I call her.


:D






jk
 
Daniel97 said:
doesn't work!

i can call my dad batman for example ..

but if i set my mother in law to mother in law - it wouldn't of called.
Click to expand...

Set it to "Motherinlaw" - works then. It sometimes does not like spaces or hyphens in the name, but strangely sometimes spaces are fine :confused:
 
daviddth said:
Set it to "Motherinlaw" - works then. It sometimes does not like spaces or hyphens in the name, but strangely sometimes spaces are fine :confused:
Click to expand...

Can you get Siri to give someone the relationship mother in law? I know you can Stepfather.
 
This is interesting but doesn't quite work how I expect/hope.

For instance, my wife's name is Tiffany. I put "Tiffers" in her nickname field, but it doesn't recognize it, probably because it's not a real word.

BUT, it does recognize names that are not common names in my address book, so I'm not sure why it doesn't correlate non-word nicknames like Tiffers like it does with names that it might not know as being real names.

That would be pretty cool to be able to "teach" it any nickname and be able to talk to it like that or add words to it's dictionary so you could say things like "Tiffers" in your dictation and it would know what you are talking about.
 
millerrh said:
This is interesting but doesn't quite work how I expect/hope.

For instance, my wife's name is Tiffany. I put "Tiffers" in her nickname field, but it doesn't recognize it, probably because it's not a real word.

BUT, it does recognize names that are not common names in my address book, so I'm not sure why it doesn't correlate non-word nicknames like Tiffers like it does with names that it might not know as being real names.

That would be pretty cool to be able to "teach" it any nickname and be able to talk to it like that or add words to it's dictionary so you could say things like "Tiffers" in your dictation and it would know what you are talking about.
Click to expand...


I assigned one of my friends the nickname "Tiffers" and I was able to get Siri to use that name no problem. I'm not sure why it isn't working for you.
 

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Strange, I just tried it again and now it's working. Maybe it has started learning the way I talk better or something. Not sure why it didn't work for me earlier. Thanks!
 
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http://www.sirisource.com has a few articles on setting up Siri, etc.
 
millerrh said:
Strange, I just tried it again and now it's working. Maybe it has started learning the way I talk better or something. Not sure why it didn't work for me earlier. Thanks!
Click to expand...

Pretty sure iCloud maintains a database of personal info from your contacts to draw upon when you use Siri, and there might have been a delay uploading the new info to the cloud.
 
Voice Dial could recognize:

"H-Mobile", "W-mobile", "Work Cell", "Work mobile"

Siri cannot.

Its gets hung up on the "Mobile" or "Work" and disregards the rest.
 
So ... what if you had two brothers? Can Siri know the difference between them? Or can she only assign "brother" to one contact?
 
pezasied182 said:
It asks you which one.
Click to expand...

Siri didn't work the way I wanted. After added same nickname for two contacts, I have choices to pick, but it is very annoy that every time I "call my brother" it keep asking "do you want me to remember Person 1 is your brother?"
 
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