If it’s too loud around you and you can’t adequately use Siri to quickly look up something real quick, there’s now an alternative to shouting out voice commands—you can now type them out. Here’s how to do it on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
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Siri can be great to use if you’re looking for a quick answer without opening up different apps or tapping through websites to find what you need. However, there are times when shouting a voice command to your iPhone isn’t ideal. Luckily, Apple thought of this and added the ability to type out a voice command on both iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.
On Your iPhone and iPad
Before you can take advantage of this feature, you have to enable it first. Start by opening up the Settings app and tap on “General”.
Select “Accessibility”.
Scroll down and tap on “Siri”.
From there, tap on the toggle switch to the right of “Type to Siri” to enable it.
From now on, whenever you activate Siri by holding down the home button, a keyboard will automatically pop up, from which you can begin typing out your Siri command. Hit “Done” in the lower-right corner to send the command after you’re done typing it out.
If you made a typo or other mistake after you sent the command, you can select “Tap to Edit” to quickly make changes to the typed-out command and resubmit it.
Enabling Type to Siri will get rid of the ability to shout voice commands when you hold down the home button to activate Siri. However, if you have Hey Siri enabled, it will let you use your voice.
On Your Mac
Typing out Siri commands is similar to iPhone and iPad, but with a different user interface. First, you’ll need to enable Type to Siri in the System Preferences. So open up System Preferences and click on “Accessibility”.
In the left-hand sidebar, scroll down and click on “Siri”.
Click on the checkbox next to “Enable Type to Siri”.
Now whenever you activate Siri, it will prompt you to type out a command instead of speaking it.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to also speak to Siri whenever you need to—once you enable Type to Siri on your Mac, you’ll only be able to type out commands and you’ll lose the ability to say commands out loud.
