Control your iPhone by voice

Speak and your iPhone shall obey

 Press and hold the iPhone's Home button or your in-wire clicker to start Voice Control.

Thanks to Voice Control, you don't even have to touch any buttons to get things done on your iPhone. In Voice Control mode, you can just say commands like "Play music" or "Call home" and your iPhone does exactly what you ask it to, Voice Control works surprisingly well - it hardly ever misses a command, and there's a wide variety of them to make using your iPhone even easier.

Activating Voice Control is simple: press and hold the Home button or the middle in-wire clicker on the iPhone 4 headphones for about two seconds. You'll hear two beeps and the Voice Control screen pops up. It shows a waveform, which represents the audio being picked up by the microphone - notice it change when you speak. You'll also see commands floating past in the background - these can all be spoken into your iPhone when in Voice Control mode. Once your command is recognised, there's usually an audio confirmation of what your iPhone is about to do, and then it'll drop out of Voice Control and perform what you've requested. Remember, you always need to activate Voice Control first before speaking a command.

Talking to your phone is odd at first, but you soon get used to it. To help you get the most out of it, we've compiled the following list of commands - try them all out.

Put it to the test

Dialling numbers is probably the main use for Voice Control. Say "Call" or "Dial", followed by the name from your contacts. If the contact has several numbers (such as home and work), the iPhone asks you to choose one. You can also just say a number after saying "Call" and your iPhone will dial it.

You can control the iPod app with Voice Control, too, Just say "Play music" to load the iPod app, or you can be more specific. "Play playlist" followed by a playlist name will play a specific list. Try "Play album" or "Play artist" as well. So, to play music by Peter Gabriel, you'd say "Play artist Peter Gabriel", While music is playing, you can activate Voice Control again and use the commands "Pause", "Next song",  

"With Voice Control, you don't even have to touch any buttons to get things done on your iPhone"

"Previous song" and "Shuffle". Now here's where it gets clever, You can even activate a new Genius Playlist based on the current song by saying "Genius" or "Play more like this". If you want to find out what the track you're listening to is, just say "What's playing?" or "Who is this song by?" to find out.

There are a few other Voice Control commands that are worth knowing about. Try saying "What time is it?" to find out the time or "Stop" to exit Voice Control, You can also say "Help" to get some spoken assistance with Voice Control.  

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It's always a good idea to wait until the Voice Control beeps have finished before you start speaking, otherwise Voice Control will miss the start of your command. Don't pause too long after the beeps, though, because this can cause confusion.