The Omni Group

Roy Batchelor: (a) if you tell Siri “Remember to…”, you won’t be prompted for when.
(b) Adding iCloud sync support to OmniFocus would take a significant amount of time away from other improvements we’d like to make to OmniFocus.

Robert: Yes, you can say “Add Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson to my Reminders list” (or “...to my OmniFocus list” if you’ve set up the separate list).

Hi all. I’ll try to answer a few more questions here, but our forums are probably a better place for on-going conversations about the new Siri integration (and any other OmniFocus topics). forums.omnigroup.com

Cath: We set this up for the iPhone 4S, because that’s where Siri is. There’s actually some extra engineering challenges getting it to work when the reminders are typed in without risking some notifications being lost.

Lee: You need to have a context set up with the same address, at the smallest radius, with same leaving/arriving setting. If that still doesn’t work, contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Lee: The solution we’ve designed for the iPhone 4S would not work well with the Mac or iPad because it could cause you to lose some notifications.

John: OmniFocus is hooked into the reminders system. You have to say something that Siri knows to put in Reminders, like “Remember to…” or “Remind me to…” or “Add _____ to my Reminders list.”

Martin: The iCloud account info is only so that OmniFocus can access your Reminders. It never gets sent to Omni. I can tell you it’s safe, but I am not a lawyer and ultimately it’s up to you (and your lawyer?) whether you feel comfortable entering your account information in any situation.

Barrett: That sounds like something we could help with more easily on the forums or via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).

Robert: Sorry, we have no control over what phrases Siri understands. (Dear Apple, please give us more flexibility to interact with Siri. Love, Omni.)

As I said above, the forums may be an easier place to collaborate with other OmniFocus users, and you’re also welcome to email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Rich: If you’re having any trouble getting this set up, please feel free to contact our tech support ninjas for assistance: you can email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or telephone us (during business hours) at 1-800-315-6664.

Tasks you enter with Siri are initially added to the Reminders app, that’s expected. Until OmniFocus for iPhone sees and captures those tasks, they’ll stay in Reminders: this means you’ll always receive timely Siri reminders on your device, either from the Reminders app or from OmniFocus (once it has a chance to capture them).

Reminders may sync your tasks with iCloud immediately, but sometimes not—that part isn’t within our control. Once Reminders does sync with iCloud, OmniFocus has the opportunity to capture those tasks—which OmniFocus will try to do each time you open it. For more details about this process and some troubleshooting advice, please see the Tips & Tricks for Siri -> OmniFocus capture thread on our forums.

But again, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team if you’re having any trouble getting this set up. We’re here to help!

Peter: We’d love richer integration with Siri than what we have now as well. We’ve thought about pre-assigning a project and context by saying something like “Remember to ‘Do stuff’ for project ‘Foo’ in context ‘Bar’ starting ‘next week’”.

But for this first pass, we just decided to focus on capturing basic tasks to your Inbox.

In some ways, perhaps it’s better that we don’t try to recognize all those other attributes yet. Not that we won’t ever do this, but speech recognition is still a rather inaccurate technology. Siri knows this, and relies on hints like knowing all of the contacts in your address book so she can match what you’ve said against them. And even then, she asks for confirmation that she’s really understood what you’ve asked her to do before she creates a reminder.

Right now, we can match against your location-based contexts fairly well because we can rely on Siri assigning a good, confirmed location (based on your current location or an entry in your address book), and we can easily match up that location with the location of one of your OmniFocus contexts.

And similarly, we can rely on the due date being what you actually meant it to be, because once again you’ve had the opportunity to confirm that date with Siri.

But for other attributes, like matching against a project or context (neither of which Siri knows by name), you could easily end up with the wrong thing assigned and bury a task in the wrong part of your database where you wouldn’t see it. It seems a bit safer for it to start out in your OmniFocus Inbox, where you can process it and make sure it’s correctly set up the way you want. (Processing it from your Inbox also gives you a good opportunity to fix up any other mistakes Siri may have made in the rest of the task’s text, as well as being an important part of the standard GTD workflow—if that’s what you’re using—where you can decide exactly what that task means and potentially break it down into multiple steps.)

Despite the above limitations, perhaps direct assignment of other attributes by looking for key phrases would be worth it anyway—if not always, at least as a preference. Or perhaps you could map lists in Reminders to your project and context lists, and that way Siri would have already confirmed a known list assignment with you.

This 1.13 release is just our first iteration; we’ll keep thinking about how to make this even better. Thank you for the feedback; it’s definitely helpful to us to know what features you’d find useful!