Siri may not be the best virtual assistant out there, but it is trying to play catch to Alexa and Google Assistant. And with the various useful Google Assistant commands and the much better conversation quality, there’s a high chance you don’t often use Siri on your iPhone. However, it is getting better, and with iOS 15, Apple’s voice assistant has now gained a useful new feature — offline Siri. Yeah, you can now use Siri offline on your iPhone. Here’s what that means, along with 10 tips to use Siri without internet.
Obviously, using Siri without internet has its limitations. You can’t do things like searching the web or ask Siri for information that requires access to the internet. However, you can ask Siri to do many things even when you don’t have an internet connection. Here’s what you can ask Siri to do while you are offline.
- What is Offline Siri?
- Set Timers
- Set Alarms
- Enable Dark Mode (or Disable It)
- Read New Messages
- Launch Apps
- Control Music Playback
- Turn Bluetooth On/ Off
- Turn Wi-Fi On/ Off
- Enable/ Disable Flight Mode
- Change Brightness
- Why is Offline Siri Better?
- Which Devices Support Siri without Internet
What is Offline Siri?
First off, what does offline Siri even mean? While it is self-explanatory for the most part, here’s a quick explanation. Basically, once you install iOS 15 on an iPhone, you will be able to use Siri even without an internet connection. Whether you are on a flight in flight mode, on a hike where and have no cellular connectivity, or trying to save battery on your road trip, you can now use Siri at all times. That’s quite useful.
1. Set Timers
You can use Siri to set timers even when you are offline by simply saying “set a timer for 10 minutes” or whatever duration you want to set the timer for.
2. Set Alarms
You can even use Siri offline to set alarms in iOS 15. It will be helpful if you are camping and have no cellular networks. Just ask Siri to “set an alarm”, and it will happily oblige.
If you are like me, you don’t always like having dark mode turned on. Well, if you want to use Siri without internet to switch your iOS 15 theme, you can do that. Just say “turn on dark mode” or “turn off dark mode”.
Even though you may not have access to your cellular network right now, you might have received messages before the network vanished, right? Well, you can use Siri offline to read out any new messages that you might have.
You can also use Siri without internet to launch apps on your iPhone. So you can say things like “open Notes”, or “launch Photos” etc, to quickly launch apps on your iPhone with Siri.
6. Control Music Playback
Another useful Siri command that you can use while offline is controlling music. So you can ask Siri offline to play or pause your song, or increase the volume, etc. It can come in quite handy.
Siri can also turn Bluetooth on/ off for you while you are not connected to the internet. This way, you can use Siri offline to change the status of your iPhone’s Bluetooth radio on the go.
Another setting that you can change with Siri while offline is Wi-Fi. Say “turn on Wi-Fi” or “turn off Wi-Fi” and Siri will toggle the Wi-Fi for you, even when you have no internet connection.
You would mostly want to use Siri offline is when you are hiking or traveling, and it is important to save battery in those situations. Well, you can say “turn on flight mode”, and Siri will enable flight mode on your iPhone to help you save more battery.
Lastly, you can use Siri offline to increase or decrease the screen brightness of your iPhone. Just say “increase the brightness” or “decrease the brightness” to get Siri to adjust your iPhone brightness as per your requirements.
Why is Offline Siri Better?
As you can see, there are a lot of things that you can now do with Siri without internet. But why is this a big deal anyway? Well, there are two main reasons that it’s nice that Siri now uses on-device processing for natural language recognition in iOS 15.
Now, since offline Siri needs to use your iPhone’s processor for on-device recognition and processing, it means you need a relatively newer iPhone for the feature to work. Apple has limited offline Siri to devices with an A12 Bionic or newer processor. Here is the list of iPhones and iPads that you can use Siri offline on.
