Tagging Reminders with Siri...Sort Of
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Tagging Reminders with Siri...Sort Of
As we covered on MacStories last month, one of the major additions to the Reminders app this year is the ability to create custom Smart Lists that filter your reminders based on various criteria. While Reminders doesn’t grant the same versatility seen in apps such as Todoist or OmniFocus for these custom views, there is a surprising degree of customization enabled by Smart Lists that should make the app more palatable to folks who have always wanted to do more with Reminders. Arguably, tags are the most important filter that Apple added to Reminders in iOS and iPadOS 15, enabling you to organize your tasks with an additional layer of categorization that goes beyond the classic folder structure. As John explained in this story, tags are centerpiece of custom Smart Lists, and they are prominently featured in the Reminders sidebar via the new tag browser.
There’s only one problem with Apple’s system: inexplicably, you can’t add tags to a reminder when using Siri. System-wide integration with Siri is one of the greatest advantages of Reminders over third-party task managers: without having to use any additional syntax, you can just say “remind me to…” and you can save a new task from anywhere with support for background sync on all Apple devices over iCloud. It’s terrific. And yet, for whatever reason, Siri has no idea how to assign a tag to a reminder. I’ve tried all possible combinations, and I’ve even checked with a few friends at Apple: Siri doesn’t support adding tags to reminders at all for now.