Time Management with the iPhone 4S

By Nicole Black

Last week, I pre-ordered my iPhone 4S at Best Buy, on the tip from a decidedly non-techie friend. I was more than thrilled to be able to avoid the mass hysteria of the Apple Store, which was located just across the street, and happily showed up at Best Buy at 8 a.m. the next morning. I was first in line and walked away with my new phone a short while later.

The main reason I chose to upgrade from my iPhone 4 to the 4S was because of the promise of the Siri Personal Assistant that is now built into the iPhone.

When the Siri app was first released, I immediately downloaded it and was intrigued by its potential. The original app was a cognitive-based speech recognition system that understood and transcribed spoken inquiries quite well.  But I found that even though it worked quite well, its use was limited, mainly because it was a stand alone app that had to be opened every time I wanted to use it. And, its capabilities were limited since it wasn’t integrated into the iPhone’s infrastructure. So, you could ask the app to determine movie times or locate restaurants nearby, but it wasn’t able to manage practical, everyday functions, such as text a message or schedule an appointment.

Other speech-to-text apps, such as Vlingo or Dragon Dictation, allow you dictate a text or email, but again, you need to open a separate app each time you want to send a message. Another reason that I rarely use these apps is that it’s a chore to recall which specific functions are built into which app. Finally, the interface of each app differs, so working within each app never became second nature for me. So, instead of using the apps, I simply chose to accomplish the various tasks manually.

Now I have another choice, a better choice–the iPhone 4S and Siri.

Siri aside, the beauty of the new iPhone is that speech-to-text dictation is built into the phone’s interface. So, every time the keyboard pops up, whether in an email, text or web search, you have the option to dictate input rather than type it, and your speech is then immediately, and accurately, transcribed for you, as shown below.

Image Source: MacRumors.com

Having the convenient speech-to-text option easily available, regardless of which app you’re working in, makes the new iPhone 4S worth its weight in gold. The Siri Assistant is just icing on the cake.

Not only does the Siri Assistant Provide endless hours of entertainment for both you (per my instruction, Siri now refers to me as “Sexy Mama“) and your children, it also may well prove to be the computer interface for future generations. The feature’s inherent flexibility and responsiveness–made possible because it’s cloud-based–and its ease of accessibility and simplicity of use are what make the iPhone 4S Siri interface so appealing.

It’s a simple matter to instruct Siri to complete a task–such as sending a text or email, scheduling an appointment, calling a contact, performing a web search or obtaining information. And, doing so saves time because the task is accomplished so much more quickly than if you’d try to perform the task manually or via a live assistant, as this rather humorous video shows.

You can streamline your dictation by following these useful tips from iSource. It’s really not all that different from typical dictation and once you get the hang of it, dictating to your iPhone is no different–and just as easy–as dictating to your secretary.

So, although many were initially disappointed with Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4S as opposed to a completely redesigned iPhone 5, I think the iPhone 4S is far from a disappointment. While, for lawyers,  the iPhone 4S may not offer anything practical in terms of redesigned hardware, the new platform and Siri Assistant interface has the potential to be a true time saver.

As they say, time is money–and that’s all the more true when you bill by the hour. So for time-strapped lawyers in search of cost effective efficiency, the iPhone 4S may very well be just what the doctor ordered.

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