Get the most out of Siri on your Mac with these cool shortcuts and secrets

Siri, your digital personal assistant, has been a part of macOS for years now and it grows in efficiency and effectiveness with each new system update. But how many of us even remember to use Siri and, when we do, how many of us bother to drill down into its many uses and the time-saving shortcuts it can provide? Unlike your iPhone, which listens out for “Hey Siri” commands like an attentive, twitching canine eager to serve its master, Siri must be summoned on Mac by either pressing a determined keyboard shortcut or clicking on the Siri icon in your Mac’s menu bar. But this extra effort pays dividends, for example, in the time it would usually take you to access and tweak settings in System Preferences, look up information on the internet, or search for files.

In this feature we share our favourite Siri commands for lightening our workload and improving productivity, as well as revealing what you can say to access Siri’s more playful side.

Set up Siri

Before you can start exploiting the power of Siri on your Mac, you will first need to take a few moments to set your digital assistant up correctly. To do this, start by going to System Preferences>Siri and work through the following…

1 Enable Ask Siri

Make sure that the ‘Enable Ask Siri’ box is ticked as this effectively turns on Siri. You can also tick the ‘Show Siri in menu bar’ option to provide a handy shortcut.

2 Create a shortcut

Rather than clicking on the menu bar item, it is far quicker to press a keyboard shortcut to call up Siri. Go to Keyboard Shortcut>Customise to create your own.

3 Language and voice

Obviously, ensure that the language is set to your native tongue, unless you are studying a foreign language, and click on the ‘Siri Voice’ menu to select the accent.

4 Voice feedback?

This refers to you being able to hear what Siri is saying to you. You can turn it off and still fire commands at Siri, you just won’t be able to hear it responding audibly.

5 Suggestions

Click on ‘Siri Suggestions & Privacy’ and you will be able to add/deselect apps that Siri is able to learn from and make related suggestions to.