The primary focus of this post is that you can drive safely and keep your eyes on the road without touching your iPhone. Sometimes, you might have to do a swipe up and tap I’m not Driving to have Siri do more for you. Unlike Google Assistant which helps wherever you need it once you give it permission, Siri reacts differently if it detects that you are driving or sitting in a car as a passenger.

First, disable the right button from having access to Siri and turn on Hey Siri voice activation. Especially if you want to stop pocket calls and plan to use it in a mount while driving.

Secondly, add Do Not Disturb While Driving in Control Center and adjust your settings in Do Not Disturb to hide all notifications while driving.

I require Face Unlock for most of these commands to work especially those that are confidential. I don’t allow any notifications on my lock screen unless it’s weather.

I have written about how to start navigation with Google Maps and Waze on an older post.

• Hey Siri, turn on Bluetooth (or “enable Bluetooth”)
• Hey Siri, then manually turn up the volume button while it says it is listening (Siri voice, Bluetooth volume, and notifications/ringer volume are all separate especially while the iPhone is being charged or in iPod USB)
• Hey Siri, set volume to 50%
• Hey Siri, set brightness to 10% (or “dim screen”)
• Hey Siri, play all music in my library (sync all music to iPhone with iTunes on same WiFi, use 128GB or larger capacity)
  Hey Siri, shuffle music in my library
• Hey Siri, play music from my Christian genre
• Hey Siri, play all my Korean music
• Hey Siri, skip song
• Hey Siri, skip two songs
• Hey Siri, stop music
• Hey Siri, pause music
• Hey Siri, continue playing music
• Hey Siri, open Apple Podcasts
• Hey Siri, play the latest episode of the Create Photography podcast
• Hey Siri, send a text message
• Hey Siri, send a text to Brother (in contacts, add Brother to nickname field)
• Hey Siri, do I have any text messages (checks all)
• Hey Siri, do I have any recent text messages (checks recent)
• Hey Siri, how far is town A from Town B
• Hey Siri, where is Williamsport
• Hey Siri, any restaurants on my route (some day it will get smarter and actually show results on the map instead of asking me about each one)
• Hey Siri, any open restaurants near me (some day it will get smarter and not tell me about restaurants that are currently closed)
• Hey Siri, any gluten-free restaurants near me (some day it will get smarter and not share non-gluten-free restaurants with me)

Now, these are other commands that I have written a Shortcut for because the functionality was missing or I got tired of repeating myself.

• Hey Siri, play Enya (shuffles all songs in my music library by artist Enya)
• Hey Siri, drive home (navigates home, turns on dark mode, sends a text to my family that I’m driving home, disables screen rotation, plays Newsboys artist)
• Hey Siri, take a picture (opens back camera in background of Apple Shortcuts app, takes picture, saves to Apple Photos)
• Hey Siri, take a selfie (opens front camera in background of Apple Shortcuts app, takes picture, saves to Apple Photos)

I was inspired to write this after reading Jim Grey’s comments on his post, Dashboard, where he mentioned having to touch his iPhone to play music.

And two people in North Carolina asked me about the new distracted driving law so here are links for North and South Carolina and Indiana.

• https://www.ncdot.gov/initiatives-policies/safety/driving-safety/Pages/driving-laws.aspx
• https://www.drivinglaws.org/topics/north-carolina
• https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/south-carolina-s-cellphone-use-texting-while-driving-laws.html
• https://www.dmv.com/ca/california/distracted-driving-laws
• https://www.in.gov/dol/2873.htm