macOS Sierra: Using Content-Aware Reminders

A couple of years ago, I wrote a tip about using the so-called content-aware reminders under iOS 9. Well, with Siri and Sierra (say that five times fast), you can now do something similar on the Mac; if you’re looking at an email, say, you can ask your computer to remind you to follow up on it in any time frame you’d like. OK, I gotta confess that I haven’t been using the Mac-based version of Apple’s voice assistant much, but this I do use. It’s helpful! So helpful that I’m ignoring how dorky I feel when I talk to my computer.

Here’s how it works. With whatever you want to be reminded of up on your screen—a message, a webpage, or an email, for example—invoke Siri and ask it to poke you about what you’re looking at, like this:

I’ll get right on that, Mr. Email.

(You can bring up Siri on the Mac using its colorful menu bar icon, its Dock icon, or its keyboard shortcut, which is listed in System Preferences > Siri.)

Here’s me doing the same thing with a webpage:

And when you’ve got your reminder all configured, you can go and look in the Reminders program if you’d like to check its status or confirm that it got added.

Neat! Someone should explain to me, though, why I feel so goofy talking to my Mac as opposed to my iPhone. I guess it’s because I can pretend with my phone that I’m talking to a human being and not, you know, just hanging with my good friend Siri. That’s right, we’re friends! Hey, friends who often have communication problems are still friends.

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