Remember The Milk can sync with your iPhone calendar | Hacker News Reader

Remember The Milk can sync with your iPhone calendar

blog.rememberthemilk.com

150 pointshopeless56 comments

If 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

This 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.

I 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.

I'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.

The 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.

I 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?

When I saw the headline my first reaction was: What? Unbelievable, this sounds too good to be true, but maybe the guys from RTM really found a way to do that.

When I clicked on the link I realized it has not much to do with Siri and is just about synching other iPhone apps.

Last time I checked, there was nothing sticking up my ass, but I do come to HN because it is different from Lifehacker, BusinessInsider or HuffPo. Nevertheless I do have to admit that it is a brilliant marketing move. They even started a heated discussion on HN :-)

So to extend my comment from a hacker perspective I felt tricked.

From the perspective of an online marketer I have to admit it is a brilliant move.

Maybe you just need to be more cynical. :) I saw the headline, thought, yeah, they figured out some way to connect it, and got pretty much what I expected.

Now, see, what a much more human and interesting way to express that. Contrast that with the wearisome hauteur of

> the have taught Siri nothing.

Not that having some jackass (me) be the arbiter of what's a nice way to say things is any improvement either, but I'm just saying.

This is what I love about HN. A little heat to a discussion creates more insight instead of a flame war.

I agree with you about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.

That title implies a number of things. Personally, I read it and thought "RTM managed to jailbreak Siri and teach it how to interact with a third-party API!!"

That was a very disappointing click-through because that's one misleading title, dude.

I think the problem is sometimes people try to find a way to comment. Generally unless someone is outright wrong or lying I tend to just not upvote something that wasn't very interesting. Starting an argument in a comment thread can be a great place for Karmawhores to get some action.

"but the only place with a bigger stick up its collective ass is Wikipedia."

Slashdot

Score: 5, Insightful

It could still be useful for other developers to realise that CalDav might be a good integration point with Siri

Before: 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.

Siri 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.

Yep. Simple CalDav sync from the calendar. Nothing is new on the Siri end.

You 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".

My 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.

in 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.

Why it didn't send task to RTM before is something that needs investigation. Probably a task <-> RTM synchronization failure.

My word - taught or not taught it's a nice piece of function - I do wish that people wouldn't nitpick so much

Actually, 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.

They 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!"

"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.

Do 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.

Isn'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...

Maybe 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?

Sounds like an expensive plan for your users. Then again, if you've got an iPhone 4s you probably have the cash I guess.

Expensive....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.

True, 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.

In 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.

16,000 is a large number, but it's not all that surprising. I find myself having multiple conversations at once via text often times, and will spurt out batches of around 100 texts at a time within the course of 5 minutes or so. Teenagers with a social life far more developed than my own will without a doubt hit those numbers multiple times a day.

I think a lot of this is because of the change in mindset of texting. Early on, it used to be a way to convey precise pieces of information. Now it's conversational. People send texts with "um" as the entire message.

It would be great to have open access to iMessage, that would probably be cheaper for Apple than release a 3rd party API for Siri.

Why go through iMessage when you want a direct connection? I think it's just a matter of Apple getting it right and figuring out how to ensure a good experience, yet allowing 3rd party apps to use Siri.

Because using messages you already have access to a lot Siri's understanding. 3rd party access could be very problematic if you consider that Siri would have to understand also several way to say the same things, otherwise it would become just simple keyword recognition.

It is not unusual to have free SMS with your mobile phone subscription.

A 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

Such as being able to tweet by sending an SMS to twitter.

This would work (twitter via SMS) just by adding the twitter shortcode to your contacts. I was surprised that Siri doesn't support twitter natively.

Does anyone know exactly what API's there are for accessing Siri, or is it pretty locked down at this point?

They 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.

Awesome! I was just getting annoyed about this yesterday and wishing there was a solution.

Love 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?

I can see many developers moving towards this idea of integrating Siri APIs into their apps.

Could 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).

What 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).

Location-based reminders are already implemented!

it's in iPhone 4S, but it drains your battery like crazy

Why 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?

The 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.

Yeah - lots of people are saying they're having worse battery performance on the 4S or iOS 5 (lots of people aren't, too), and then lots of those people are claiming lots of different things such as turning off various features (and also not doing anything different at all!) has dramatically helped. In other words, essentially no science is being done and no one to my knowledge can say anything definitively yet, but lots of folk remedies are being tweeted. Assuming there's not a bug in the geofencing code, it shouldn't use too much more battery at all because it only goes out to the GPS when available cell towers—which are being constantly communicated with anyway—change.

I am getting way better battery performance that I was getting on my 2.5yo 3G with iOS4 that I upgraded from so I am yet have an issue with it.

Yes, that was part of the multi-tasking model rolled out in iOS 4.

Location based reminders are a feature in iOS 5 across all phones. My vanilla 4 can do it, so presumably my old (and iOS 5 supported) 3GS can too.

Siri itself is the only (big?) iOS 5 feature that is hardware locked to the 4S.

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