Posted by Mahit Huilgol on Sep 30, 2021 in Siri
iOS 15 comes with a slew of new features and improvements. Apple has made some changes to Siri under the hood. It has now come to light that Apple has removed select Siri features used by low vision and blind iPhone users. It is not known why the company removed these utility features.
As part of the change, multiple Siri commands used for basic tasks will no longer be available. It includes commands for phone calls, voicemails and sending emails. Below is the list of commands as highlighted on the Applevis forum.
- Do I have any voicemails?
- Play my voicemail messages
- Check my call history.
- Check my recent calls
- Who called me?
- Send an email an email to [person]
We believe that the above commands are not just for the visually impaired. Anyone could use the commands to avoid picking up their iPhone and doing so manually. Weirdly enough, Apple has not mentioned anywhere about feature removal. iPhone users would be in for a rude shock when they find out Apple has removed Siri commands.
One of the people I support told me that she could no longer use Siri to send email from her iPhone 8 with iOS 14. I tried on my iPhone SE with iOS 15.0, and the response from Siri was, “sorry, I can’t help with that.”
Subsequently, I’ve had the same response on the phone running iOS 12. If this is a deliberate feature removal, it’s certainly a loss to some users with sight loss who find it a convenient way to send a brief email. I know there was a serious bug when long emails were built up in Siri by adding to an initial message, but it always worked fine for short emails.”
Interestingly the Siri commands have disappeared not only on iOS 15 but also iOS 14. One of the users reached out to an Apple executive. Furthermore, the executive confirmed that some Siri commands are no longer available. Perhaps Apple will re-add in the near future.
[via AppleVis]
