Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana are the Charlie’s Angels of personal virtual assistants, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in the battle to do good. As assistants go, none of them are very old: Siri first arrived in iOS 5 in 2011, Google Now debuted in 2012 and Microsoft’s Cortana stopped being a Halo entity and rolled out to Windows Phones in 2014; she landed on Windows 10 this summer.
In less than five years, though, assistant software has gone from fielding basic questions (“What’s the weather today?”) and handling a good-natured HAL 9000 joke now and then to opening apps, doing currency conversions, identifying songs, finding pictures from specific events and more. No pushing buttons here: Thanks to the voice commands “Hey, Siri,” “Okay Google” and “Hey Cortana,” you don’t even have to lift a finger to get results.
So, what commands can you use these days for Siri, Google Now or Cortana? These sorts of lists just keep growing and growing:
- Apple’s Siri suggestions
- iMore’s list of cool questions to ask Siri
- iMore’s “Twelve Secret Siri Commands for Apple Music”
- Google’s guide to “OK Google” voice search and actions for Android, iOS and Chrome
- GreenBot’s “A List of All the Google Now Voice Commands”
- Lifehacker’s “Everything You Can Ask Cortana to Do in Windows 10”
- Microsoft’s guide to Cortana on Windows
And, in a pinch, you might be able to just ask your assistant:
