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.
Tips to Use Siri Without Internet (2021)
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?
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.
Note: In iOS 15 developer beta 1, offline Siri isn’t working yet. However, we will update this article when Apple fixes the issue, hopefully in dev beta 2.
10 Offline Siri Tips & Tricks
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.
3. Enable Dark Mode (or Disable It)
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”.
4. Read New Messages
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.
Just say “read my new messages” to get Siri to read out any of your unread messages, even without an internet connection in iOS 15.
5. Launch Apps
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.
7. Turn Bluetooth On/ Off
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.
8. Turn Wi-Fi On/ Off
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.
9. Enable/ Disable Flight Mode
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.
10. Change Brightness
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.
The first one is privacy. Since Siri now tries to do all its voice recognition on your iPhone, it means there’s even less data that you are sending to an Apple server. For basic commands like timers, alarms, and changing iPhone settings, you no longer need to worry about your Siri requests being sent to a server.
Secondly, this results in Siri being way faster than ever before. Since Siri no longer has to connect to a server to understand and process voice commands, it can do what you ask almost instantly. Just try asking Siri to launch an app on your iPhone and see how quickly it can do it now. It’s impressive.
Which Devices Support Siri without Internet
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.
- iPhone XR
- iPhone XS
- iPhone XS Max
- iPhone 11
- iPhone 11 Pro
- iPhone 11 Pro Max
- iPhone 12
- iPhone 12 Pro
- iPhone 12 Pro Max
- iPhone SE (2nd Gen)
- iPad Mini (5th Gen)
- iPad Air (3rd and 4th Gen)
- iPad (8th Gen)
- iPad Pro
Use Siri Without an Internet Connection on iPhone
So, now that you are aware that you can use Siri offline without an internet connection, what kind of use-cases do you see for your Siri usage? Personally, I have used Siri for quite some time now, and for me, the biggest improvement is the faster Siri. Plus, I mostly use Siri for the basic alarms, phone calls type of stuff, and those are the things that are now much faster thanks to on-device voice recognition and processing. What do you think about the new offline Siri feature? Let us know in the comments.
