Here’s a very welcome new capability in the OmniFocus app. It’s now on speaking terms with Siri, the lovely (we all imagine) new voice assistant on the iPhone 4S. You can now use Siri to add  task to the OmniFocus Inbox – and it doesn’t even require sending an email. You can just ask Siri […]
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OmniFocus Works with Siri – for Adding Tasks to Inbox

Nov 19th 2011 by

SiriPlusOmniFocus

Here’s a very welcome new capability in the OmniFocus app. It’s now on speaking terms with Siri, the lovely (we all imagine) new voice assistant on the iPhone 4S.

You can now use Siri to add  task to the OmniFocus Inbox – and it doesn’t even require sending an email. You can just ask Siri to remind you of XYZ thing you need to get round to doing, as normal. Here’s how easy it is to get this setup:

In the OmniFocus iPhone app, you just go to Settings, scroll down to ‘iCloud Reminders’, turn it on, and enter your Apple ID. And that’s it, you’re done. From then on you can just ask Siri to remind you of XYZ task, give it a time or location if you like, and that task will show up in your OmniFocus Inbox.

If you specify a time and date for the reminder it will slot into the right date in OmniFocus – so for instance any reminder I add for today or tomorrow will appear in my ‘Due’ perspective.

It appears that this removes the reminders from Apple’s Reminders app and shifts them over to the OmniFocus app – which is fine by me as I have never really been keen to use the Reminders app, and rely heavily on OmniFocus.

Sync of Siri-generated tasks between OmniFocus on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac is not exactly seamless at the moment. It seems to take a few minutes for iCloud and OmniFocus sync to get everything figured out. Once an item hits the Inbox in the OmniFocus iPhone app (which happens very fast) then they should appear in the Inbox on the iPad and Mac once a sync occurs, either automatic or manual. I’ve found sometimes it can lag a little though and take a few minutes and a few syncs for all three OmniFocus apps to show the same Inbox.

I hope and expect that as Apple gradually provides more support for Siri integration in third party apps, this sync will improve greatly. Even as it is now, I think this is a great new feature for OmniFocus.

Check out the Omni Group’s blog post on Siri support for more on how this came about and demo videos on setup.

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