Notes on my Apple Watch

All I want for Christmas is the ability to take notes on my Apple Watch. On my iPhone I can invoke Siri and say “Create a new note” and then dictate the note. But I can’t do that on my watch.

The reason I’ve heard in the past is that in order for notes to operate on the watch it would involve deciding what to do with notes that include images or sounds. But I can’t see that it would be that difficult to manage that or even identify the text elements of any note and sync them.

At the moment I’m still using drafts on my watch because that allows me to have little bits of information readily available with me on the watch. But it’s frustrating that I can’t do this with the native Notes app.

If you loved Siri like I love Siri.

There is a fashion these days amongst tech pundits to go on and on about how awful Siri is, but in my experience it’s not, it’s amazing. I use it all the time.

I use it mostly through my watch, where I have Raise to Speak turned on so I don’t even have to say the phrase “Hey Siri”, I just raise my wrist to my mouth and start speaking.

I use it for reminding myself to do things, checking how long it will take me to get to certain locations, setting timers, and triggering things around the house, like turning on lights or turning on the TV.

I also use it a lot for dictation. This has got slightly frustrating recently, but I suspect it is more because I’ve taken on my wife’s iPhone 12 and gave her my iPhone 15 so the phone has had less time to get used to my voice and also the processor is slower so it’s probably having to work harder. But even so, if I take my time and speak carefully, it is perfectly capable of allowing me to dictate text into messages or blog posts.

I even use it when I’m sitting at my desk using my iPad and have my phone on a stand which places it slightly out of reach. I’m able to control my phone remotely asking Siri to instigate phone calls or open particular apps and get those apps to do things without having to take my hands off the iPad keyboard.

The one thing I don’t tend to use Siri very much for is asking questions that require answers from the web. It’s not very good for that and I suspect this small aspect of Siri’s usage is what others get frustrated at.