Siri’s integration with your iOS Contacts can be very handy for placing calls, sending e-mails and messages and getting directions. However unless everybody in your address book has simple to pronounce names like “Bob Smith” it’s likely you’ve had less than satisfying results when trying to look up your friends by voice. Fortunately, there’s a fairly simple way to help Siri with hard-to-pronounce names—like Phil Dzikiy—simply by adding the phonetic pronunciation of each name directly to the Contact record. Simply open the Contacts app, tap on the person’s name and tap Edit. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page you should see an “Add Field” option, which you can tap on to see a list of additional fields that you can add to your contact record. For example, for Phil Dzikiy, you would choose Phonetic Last Name and type in something along the lines of “Dezeekee” and then do the same for the Phonetic First Name and enter “Fill.” As an added bonus, not only will this help Siri recognize your friends’ names better, but it should also help her with the pronunciation when the names are read back to you. Unfortunately, it’s worth mentioning that there is a small downside to this approach: the iOS Contacts app will sort your Contacts based on the Phonetic Names, when present, rather than the actual names, so this will affect the sorting of your Contacts, however that may be a small price to pay for accurate recognition of their names.
