I’ve been playing around with various ways to make this happen, and found this to be the best so far, despite a defect in Siri. It requires gmail and ifttt.
All the instructions are at http://ifttt.com/recipes/18758, but they are copied here because ifttt mangles the formatting of the instructions and makes them difficult to read.
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This recipe allows the user to create a Nozbe inbox item by adding a note with Siri.
To configure it, do the following:
1. Authorise your gmail account with ifttt. Note that I created a separate gmail account for this purpose – for security reasons unnecessary services should not have read/write access to my gmail.
2. Add the gmail account you will be using as a mail account on your iPhone.
3. Open that account in Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
4. Ensure the “Notes” toggle is set to on in the account settings.
5. Add this recipe to your ifttt account. Before creating the task, you need to enter your nozbe input email address into the “To” field of the receipe. To find your nozbe address, open Nozbe web, then go to Settings -> Your Nickname and PIN.
6. Now you can use Siri to create a Nozbe task called “pay credit card bill” by saying “Note that pay credit card bill” or similar.
Warning: Due to a defect in Siri (apparently confirmed by Apple), notes created by Siri are not always synchronised with the cloud. Here is a workaround:
1. Once you have created the note with Siri, it will appear on the screen. Tap it.
2. The note will now display in the notes app, click the pen icon to edit it, add a space to the end, then click done.
3. Your note will now sync.
Fingers crossed that Apple corrects this in 5.0.2, as the extra step turns a 10 second hands-free input into a more fiddly 30-second task. I still find this quicker than using Siri to send an email direct to nozbe, but I am looking forward to the defect fix!
Comments:
As there is currently another bug in Siri (if you have several accounts for your notes, Siri doesn’t choose the default one), I also created a new gmail account and used the following IFTTT rule:
IF (email from my private mail), then
Mail (to my nozbe account),
subject: (empty)
body:
<body of mail></br> (this adds the body of your mail as a comment to your task
<asterisk><space><subject from mail>
See Tristan’s recipe in the thread and it should be clear. See also this thread:
http://www.nozbe.com/gtd/forum/section-1/post-d4ca201d/howto:_create_nozbe_tasks_using_ifttt
On my iphone I created a new contact with the new gmail account (I used a name which Siri can easily understand, like “toto”)
Then I tell Siri to send a mail to “toto” with the task as subject and a comment in the body.
Tristan and Mathias — brilliant! I did it exactly as Mathias outlined, and it works beautifully (it does not appear in Nozbe instantaneously, but that’s OK).
One could do this more directly, by just asking Siri to email directly to Nozbe -> but there is a hitch.
I say “Email Nozbe about blank and say asterisk space bar Read to Jason tonight”. Siri creates an email to my Nozbe account, with subject “blank”, and body of email as “*Read to Jason tonight.”
Even though I said “asterisk space bar read”, Siri puts in “*Read” — without a space between the asterisk and the first word of the task “Read”.
And Nozbe syntax REQUIRES a space between * and the first word of the task to be understood as a task.
Possible solutions to this:
1) How can you make Siri insert a space between * and the first word? Or,
2) How about if Nozbe recognized “*Read” (without a space) as a valid syntax for a task? What would be the downside of dropping the requirement of having a space between the asterisk and the first word?
Thank you.
That’s why I use ifttt: to be able to have the asterisk and space before the task description.
Although Siri is a nice feature to input tasks into Nozbe, it is definitely not the main one; therefore I don’t expect either Apple or Nozbe to change anything in their functionality because of us :-).
Thanks Guys.
A bit fiddly to set up for me (a non technical person) but well worth it! It works and now Siri really can help with my .Nozbe inputs. Cheers
I’m happy to report that as of iOS 5.1, the notes syncing defect is fixed.
So now I can just say “note <my nozbe task>”, and a short while after <my nozbe task> appears in the nozbe inbox.
As a plus, this trick can be used for almost any service on the web which can be activated with an email/ifttt trigger. With some fiddling with gmail filters, you can have multiple triggers concurrently.
Hi Tristan, I’m trying to set this up but it doesn’t seem to be working for me. I created a new gmail account to use, I associated it with ifttt. I created a recipe with the directions above but nothing comes to my inbox. Not really sure what to tell you to explain it any better. Thanks for your help.
Ellen
not sure what I did but it seems to be working now. Thanks Tristan for a fun way to add tasks to my inbox
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Thank you Tristan… I have just tried it out and it did work ;-)