Textual Siri

Here's a good article by Rene Ritchie from June 2012 about a textual interface for Siri:

If Spotlight could access Siri's contextually aware response engine, the same great results could be delivered back, using the same great widget system that already has buttons to touch-confirm or cancel, etc.

I completely agree. Spotlight lets you find apps and data to launch on your device; aside from its “assistant” functionality, Siri lets you search for specific information (either on your device or the web). There's no reason find and search shouldn't be together. Siri gained app-launching capabilities, but Spotlight still can't accept Siri-like text input.

The truth is, I think using Siri in public is still awkward. My main use of Siri is adding calendar events or quick alarms when I'm a) cooking or b) driving my car. When I'm working in front of an iPad, I just don't see the point of using voice input when I have a keyboard and the speech recognition software is still failing at recognizing moderately complex Italian queries. When I'm waiting for my doctor or in line at the grocery store, I just don't want to be that guy who pulls out his phone and starts talking with a robotic assistant. Ten years after my first smartphone, I still prefer avoiding phone calls in public because a) other people don't need to know my business and b) I was taught that talking on the phone in public can be rude. How am I supposed to tell Siri to “read me” my schedule when I have 10 people around me?

I think a textual Siri, capable of accepting written input instead of spoken commands, would provide a great middle ground for those situations when you don't want to/can't talk in public. Like Rene, I think putting the functionality in Spotlight would be a fine choice; apps like Fantastical have shown that “natural language input” with text can still be a modern, useful addition to our devices.

Text input brings different challenges: how would Siri handle typos? Would it wait until you've finished writing a sentence or refresh with results as-you-type? Would Siri lose its “conversational” approach, or provide butttons to reply with “Yes” or “No” to its further questions?

Text, however, has also its advantages: text is universal, free of voice alterations (think accents and dialects), independent from surrounding noise and/or microphone proximity. With a textual Siri, Apple could keep its users within its control by letting them ask for restaurant suggestions, weather information, unit conversions, or sports results without having to open other apps and/or launch Google.

It's just absurd to think semantic search integration can only be applied to voice recognition, especially in the current version of Siri. I agree with Kontra: Siri isn't really about voice.

More importantly: if Google can do it, why can't Apple?

OmniOutliner, Plain Text, and Nebulous Notes

A few months ago, I asked if there was a way to produce plain text-based outlines and import them into OmniOutliner for iPad while preserving indentation. Today, Jeff Hunsberger has posted a nice overview of his setup, which doesn’t include OmniOutliner but relies upon the same “trick” I use — speeding up plain text outlining using Nebulous Notes‘ macro functionality.

Just by setting up those few macros, I have create a fully-realized meeting outline tool in markdown using Nebulous Notes. The outline in the same format I’ve been using for years and is searchable, extensible and ubiquitous thanks to Dropbox. The beauty of this is, after the meeting is over, the notes I’ve just taken are ready back at my desk — they can be inserted into an email to the team with a simple copy/paste.

My workflow is only slightly different. Firstly, I usually outline in CarbonFin Outliner on the iPad (Tree on the Mac), but sometimes good ideas strike when I’m already in my text editor, thus requiring me to write them down as quickly as possible. What I end up with is a rough structure of my thoughts that I want to further refine in OmniOutliner. From there, I’ll then export as OPML to CarbonFin Outliner. It sounds convoluted — maybe it is — but this setup works for me. This is how I built the outlines for my Mountain Lion and iOS 6 reviews, and I’m always looking for improvements.

As I discovered, OmniOutliner for iPad wants to receive tab-delimited plain text. So, unlike Jeff’s, my macro doesn’t have hyphens, just a tab that I can hit as many times as I need to indent text into lines and children. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like tab-delimited plain text can handle notes, but that’s something I do in OmniOutliner or CarbonFin Outliner anyway.

I would love to see proper documentation for plain text import in OmniOutliner; for instance, while OmniOutliner can export to plain text, if you try to re-import what you exported (I know, I like to reverse-engineer plain text), OmniOutliner will lose indentation. Similarly, I’d like to see import/export options in CarbonFin Outliner, which is still lacking from this standpoint. As for Nebulous Notes, the latest 6.0 version lets you chain macros, which makes the app even better.

Check out Jeff’s plain text workflow for outlines here.

Plain Text Primer

Michael Schechter has kicked off a new series over at A Better Mess, detailing the basics of working with plain text. In today’s article, he covers nvALT, Brett Terpstra’s excellent fork of Notational Velocity.

nvALT is a free note-taking tool with some great features for plain text and markdown editing. It serves as the foundation for my plain text workflows. It stores all of my text files in an environment that is lightening fast for creating and searching through notes. I use nvALT as a repository for everything.

Personally, I’m a big fan of both plain text and nvALT. As I have written on multiple occasions before, plain text is portable, timeless, and it happens to work with some of the finest apps on the App Store.

Michael’s overview is a good starting point if you’re interested in plain text. Check it out here, and here.

Organizing Everything With Plain Text Notes

In a guest post for Macworld, Macdrifter‘s Gabe Weatherhead shares some tips about his note-taking workflow, based on plain text files.

Like everyone else, I need to keep track of lots of bits of information. Some of those bits are as simple as the brand of salad dressing my wife likes; others are as complex as an outline for a multi-year project at work. Whatever the size, origin, and purpose of these bits, I keep track of them all by saving them in a reliable system of plain-text notes—a system that enables me to find any bit of information whenever I need it, in a form that makes sense to me when I do.

My workflow is similar to Gabe’s one. I store all my notes — rigorously in plain text format for data portability — in a single Dropbox folder, and I use a variety of apps and hacks to work with these files on the device at hand. The advantage of working in plain text is that I never have to worry about file conversion and corrupted databases — and when combined with Dropbox, it really all just works. Plus, I can stay assured that, twenty years from now, an archive of my notes will still be there, as plain text — like PDF — will likely be around.

On the Mac, like Gabe, I use Brett Terpstra’s excellent nvALT to switch between all my notes. I don’t use tagging, but I do use Alfred to peek inside the contents of my plain text files to find links or bits of text I had previously saved (like favorite tweets). Occasionally, I might write in TextEdit or Byword, but generally — no matter the app I’m using — Markdown previews are handled by Terpstra’s other insanely useful app, Marked. On iOS, as I recently explained, I tend to access my notes with a combination of Nebulous Notes, Writing Kit, and WriteUp depending on what I need. To quickly save notes into Dropbox, I rely on Drafts, which was recently updated to version 2.0.

I like plain text because it lets me write and access my notes the way I want to. As David Sparks once wrote, it’s timeless. Make sure to read Gabe’s post here for some great tips.

Toggler

I don’t always manipulate chunks of text on iOS, but when I do, I use Toggler. Available for free on the App Store, Toggler lets you easily convert text to Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize, and tOGGLE cASE. It lets you paste the original text you want to modify in the first tab, which is the only one that brings up the iOS keyboard to edit text. With one tap, you can manipulate text and copy it to the clipboard, send it via email, or clear it. The app also displays character and word counts, and it lets you find & replace.

I mainly use Toggler to convert sentences to headlines for MacStories, and to quickly find and replace words for my articles. Free on the App Store.

Macworld’s “Four Great OS X Services You Don’t Know About”

Good list by Kirk McElhearn. I would add Brett Terpstra’s fantastic Markdown Service Tools, if only because they’re great in conjunction with WordService.

Speaking of automation, make sure to check out Junecloud’s Automator workflows too. They’re really well done and I use them on a daily basis.