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Remember The Milk can sync with your iPhone calendar
- hopeless 15y agoA similar approach (setting up your own CalDav server) might work for lots of other todo/reminder sites. Furthermore, I wonder if there are any other types of services which could be integrated with Siri in this manner
- robmcm 15y agoSuch as being able to tweet by sending an SMS to twitter.
- LiveTheDream 15y agoThis would work (twitter via SMS) just by adding the twitter shortcode to your contacts. I was surprised that Siri doesn't support twitter natively.
- bbhacker 15y agoIf I understand correctly, the have taught Siri nothing. What you see is task list synchronization between the iPhone and RTM. You talk to Siri -> Siri creates a task -> Task is synced to RTM
- wccrawford 15y agoActually, Siri is creating a calendar event, and syncing that to RTM. They aren't claiming to have taught Siri to add events... They're claiming to have integrated with RTM. I suspect there might be an issue with having a calendar AND a task list both, though... Like, you can't.
- btn 15y agoThey aren't claiming to have taught Siri to add events From the article: "we had to teach Siri to add tasks to Remember The Milk [...] and we're super excited to announce that we've done just that!"
- wccrawford 15y ago"to Remember The Milk" If you leave out that bit, then you're correct, they were claiming they taught Siri to add events. But that bit is important.
- hopeless 15y agoIt could still be useful for other developers to realise that CalDav might be a good integration point with Siri
- mikeash 15y agoBefore: Siri doesn't send tasks to RTM. After: Siri sends tasks to RTM. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your quibble with the word "taught"? That seems pretty minor.
- z92 15y agoWhy it didn't send task to RTM before is something that needs investigation. Probably a task <-> RTM synchronization failure.
- cschep 15y agoSiri isn't sending anything to anyone. I think that's his point. Siri added a task to a calendar, just like she has always "known" how to do.
- mikeash 15y agoYou tell Siri to add a task, and then it shows up in this other thing. You can quibble about just which entity is doing the sending, but that seems even more pointless than quibbling over "taught".
- hmottestad 15y agoYep. Simple CalDav sync from the calendar. Nothing is new on the Siri end.
- kamechan 15y agoin my opinion, "taught" seems to imply that siri can actively learn. though siri is an intelligent agent which does speech recognition (firmly planting it in the world of AI), i am under the impression that siri does not actively learn and so saying "taught" in the context of speaking about an AI could be construed as misleading. i could be mistaken about whether siri can do "learning" or not, as i'm not intimately familiar with the tech.
- jjcm 15y agoMy quibble isnt with the word "taught", but rather with the overall wording conveyed in the title. As it is now, it seems to suggest that they've uncovered a hidden API where you can add custom grammars to Siri. A more accurate title would be, "RTM can sync with your iphone calendar". It really has little to do with Siri itself. Any calendar task will be synced, not just ones created by Siri.
- whyleym 15y agoMy word - taught or not taught it's a nice piece of function - I do wish that people wouldn't nitpick so much
- danilocampos 15y agoThis comment demonstrates everything that has come to exhaust me about Hacker News. There are myriad things to praise about this community, to be certain, but the only place with a bigger stick up its collective ass is Wikipedia.
- albemuth 15y agoI don't think this applies for this comment, I mean, the title suggests teaching something to an AI, which in the case of Siri would open a lot of very interesting options, I'm sure I'm not the only one who expected something along those lines and was disappointed. "RTM Siri setup instructions" is a less attractive title though.
- mikeash 15y agoI've seen the word "teach" used to talk about setting up or programming a computer on many occasions before. It's completely appropriate. I can see why you'd be disappointed but that's not a reason to complain.
- roc 15y agoThe headline would be fine in a magazine article or a tech-light site like Lifehacker. But, because of Siri's architecture, telling a forum of hackers that you've "taught it" to do something is a wildly different thing. Hackers click that headline because they're interested in the possibility space where you can integrate arbitrary third party apps. And when they discover that your headline is a semantic game --that the implicit promise of the headline is a lie-- I don't know how you could expect anything other than complaints.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jpendry 15y agoI upvoted because I completely agree. But then I thought about it, and isn't this also an example of a hack in it's purest sense?
- krobertson 15y agoDo you also have a problem with marketing that says "we're revolutionizing the XYZ industry" by arguing over the use of the word "revolutionizing"? While technically they haven't "taught" anything, I think you're also blowing it out of proportion. Its a creative hack, clean to setup, and useful for their users.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- robjohnson 15y agoI can see many developers moving towards this idea of integrating Siri APIs into their apps.
- jasonlotito 15y agoCould you set up an email for your app, and allow messages to be sent to your app from siri? Instead of posting to twitter directly, you send something via Siri to your contact, Twitter, which is an email that will post to twitter? Basically, makes email act as the API. Edit: Just realized twitter supports SMS (for a long time, didn't support Canada, at least, from what I remember).
- marknutter 15y agoDoes anyone know exactly what API's there are for accessing Siri, or is it pretty locked down at this point?
- rjvir 15y agoThey aren't accessing any API's - Siri is still pretty locked down at this point, and will be for a while. All this does is sync your Calender with Remember the Milk, which never actually interacts with Siri.
- seanMeverett 15y agoLove this hack, it's the reason I joined HN, to learn about things exactly like this. My question is, when Apple opens the API, are we going to see Siri games?
- wofser 15y agoWhat would be really cool is to make reminders that reminds you when you are in a special area. For example: When I am close to a special shop it reminds me to get that special battery that only them have. When I get home it reminds me to do something in my home, take out the trash for example. When I visit a friend I get a reminder about something I should inform him of. Location-based notifiers instead of time-based (or a combination so it would not remind me to go to the store nearby in the middle of the night and its closed).
- raimondious 15y agoLocation-based reminders are already implemented!
- sharkman 15y agoit's in iPhone 4S, but it drains your battery like crazy
- jaxn 15y agoWhy do you say it drains your battery like crazy? I am not saying it doesn't, but I haven't noticed it. Doesn't iOS now have a location service that will update apps of your location without running the app constantly in the background?
- incremental 15y agoYes, that was part of the multi-tasking model rolled out in iOS 4.
- jcurbo 15y agoThe location based reminders use cell phone tower-based location, not GPS. Since your phone is constantly polling cell phone towers anyway, it shouldn't use more battery than usual, unless it forces the phone to poll towers more frequently. (I'm not sure of the implementation details) I personally have not noticed more battery drain than normal on my 4S.
- 15y ago
- paul9290 15y agoMaybe they could have used the SMS hack to interface with Siri too? As of now via Siri I can update Twitter and Facebook by telling Siri, "Text Facebook," or "Text Twitter." In my contacts i created a Facebook contact with my carrier's FB short code, as well created a Twitter contact with it's short code. This same hack possibly could be applied to Evernote, ping.fm, a wake up call service (random example) & other services that have a SMS component?
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoSounds like an expensive plan for your users. Then again, if you've got an iPhone 4s you probably have the cash I guess.
- sharken 15y agoIt is not unusual to have free SMS with your mobile phone subscription.
- paul9290 15y agoExpensive....possibly depending where you live? Most people in the US have unlimited text plans. Either they are built into their monthly bill (Sprint unlimited everything $80 a month) or subscribers pay an additional fee on top their voice/data bill for unlimited SMS.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoTrue, it's a 10 euro addon here for 1000 "unlimited" messages, dropping now however because data usage has grown massively, while the texting cash cow dropped (Whatsapp and BBM). It's still a bad solution for the problem as a whole.
- BrandonM 15y agoIn the US unlimited messaging typically means just that. And thankfully so, because about a year ago my teenage brother was on my plan and managed to send/receive 16,000 texts in a single month.
- ajpatel 15y agoIsn't the problem with their hack though that it can only work for ONE calendar? Whichever one you set as the default is going to be the one service that Siri can interact with. So if RTM is set as your default calendar, then all your Siri reminders go into your RTM calendar, which may not be your actual calendar of course. And getting other services to use this same hack will result in users having to choose one service they prioritize over all others because you can only have one calendar. Of course I am an Android guy and don't really know how Siri and all this is working - I'm just guessing based on the instructions provided at RTM's site on how to get this to work...
- hartror 15y agoAwesome! I was just getting annoyed about this yesterday and wishing there was a solution.
- numbchuckskills 15y agoI taught Siri to scan Hacker News for sensational titles/link-bait and bury the stories, but she saw her name, got a little excited and told me it was worth reading.