Saying Hello to Siri

Siri uses several chimes. These let you know when it’s listening to you. A higher chime starts a session, and a lower one finishes it. To hear this, raise your phone to your ear, and then place it back down on a table. The high chirps mean Siri is listening; the low chirps mean it is done listening.

Try the following: raise the phone to your ear, wait for the preliminary chirps, say “Hello,” and then pause. Siri uses pause detection to know when you’ve stopped speaking. Again, you hear the second set of chirps, but this time you hear them without moving the phone away from your ear.

If you have a good Internet connection—a requirement of working with Siri—you’ll hear it respond to you. Siri responds “Hi” or “Hello,” perhaps adding your name (see Figure 1-2, top). As you talk, Siri creates a scrolling list of responses, so you can review the conversation to date. By default, Siri automatically scrolls up to the most recent response, so you might want to pull down on the list to see what has gone before.