Siri is nicer than I expected. Siri popped up while I wasn't paying attention, I recall being told about it after I had replaced my iPhone 3G with a Samsung Galaxy S4 in 2013.
Siri can play music on the phone itself. Which is kinda cool. I saw the suggested command "Play some blues" and sure enough it worked, though I wasn't sure where it got the Blues from or whether I was getting charged. I hope not.
I then sync'd my phone. Since my last iPhone experience sync'ing has gotten much better. I can select the albums I want on the phone. My entire library would take about 300Gb. So I selected something like 30 albums, and it filled up 50 Gb on the phone. That didn't seem right. I'll have to investigate.
As I was doing this it was dawning on me: due to communication issues I never copied ANY music to my Galaxy phone. The only way I found to copy large folders was to actually remove the memory chip, and I decided not to bother. And it turns out that Android File Transfer is just as broken wrt the Samsung Galaxy S4 as it ever was…I downloaded the latest "version" (actually it looks identical to what I have) and it still can't even open a large folder.
So with 30 albums on my phone, I asked Siri to play some William Orbit, and I was Orbiting the rest of the night.
But it would have been nicer to be able to have Siri control Sonos…then I could have it play music over my real high end audio systems in every room, rather than just the puny iPhone speaker. I tried a command to do that:
Hey Siri,
Play some Beethoven on the Bedroom Sonos system.
Of course that didn't work (even after I had downloaded and opened the Sonos app) and a tiny bit of web searching revealed that people have been begging for this feature for quite some time and still are up to last week. They seem to be begging Sonos to add Siri support to the Sonos app, though I wonder if the limitation doesn't come from what Apple allows Siri to do.
Then, here is an article titled so as to make you (falsely) believe that Amazon's Echo will control Sonos.
No dice there. But what I have found is a kit to make Siri control any kind of home automation, including Sonos and X10. (Insteon please!) The author says this is for truly dedicated geeks for now, eventually we hope the product developers will add their own custom shims. But it looks sufficiently fascinating that I might try.
Siri can play music on the phone itself. Which is kinda cool. I saw the suggested command "Play some blues" and sure enough it worked, though I wasn't sure where it got the Blues from or whether I was getting charged. I hope not.
I then sync'd my phone. Since my last iPhone experience sync'ing has gotten much better. I can select the albums I want on the phone. My entire library would take about 300Gb. So I selected something like 30 albums, and it filled up 50 Gb on the phone. That didn't seem right. I'll have to investigate.
As I was doing this it was dawning on me: due to communication issues I never copied ANY music to my Galaxy phone. The only way I found to copy large folders was to actually remove the memory chip, and I decided not to bother. And it turns out that Android File Transfer is just as broken wrt the Samsung Galaxy S4 as it ever was…I downloaded the latest "version" (actually it looks identical to what I have) and it still can't even open a large folder.
So with 30 albums on my phone, I asked Siri to play some William Orbit, and I was Orbiting the rest of the night.
But it would have been nicer to be able to have Siri control Sonos…then I could have it play music over my real high end audio systems in every room, rather than just the puny iPhone speaker. I tried a command to do that:
Hey Siri,
Play some Beethoven on the Bedroom Sonos system.
Of course that didn't work (even after I had downloaded and opened the Sonos app) and a tiny bit of web searching revealed that people have been begging for this feature for quite some time and still are up to last week. They seem to be begging Sonos to add Siri support to the Sonos app, though I wonder if the limitation doesn't come from what Apple allows Siri to do.
Then, here is an article titled so as to make you (falsely) believe that Amazon's Echo will control Sonos.
No dice there. But what I have found is a kit to make Siri control any kind of home automation, including Sonos and X10. (Insteon please!) The author says this is for truly dedicated geeks for now, eventually we hope the product developers will add their own custom shims. But it looks sufficiently fascinating that I might try.
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