I picked up my iPhone 4 yesterday and one of the coolest new features is the Siri personal assistant. A lot has been written about this already, but I discovered something cool about the speech to text feature last night that I thought I would share.
Siri lets you compose Twitter updates, Facebook updates, notes, text messages and even blog posts “I’m using it to write this” by voice. When I first tried it, I was disappointed to see that it didn’t include any punctuation. As a writer and former English major, that bothered me.
Then I tried the approach that I’ve learned to use with all Apple products; I tried the simplest thing I could think of.
To add punctuation, just speak the punctuation you want to add.
To compose that sentence, I said “To add punctuation comma just speak the punctuation you want to add period.”
It’s an extremely elegant solution, and one that has allowed me to write this “properly punctuated” blog post in about three minutes, almost exclusively using my voice.
