IOS – When can I tell Siri to ‘Remind me about this’

I'll split your question into two main areas since one is easily answerable, the other isn't without inside knowledge of how location services work within iOS.

• How to make a reminder for when you re-arrive at the place you sit now?
• What is the special sauce and all the ways I can tweak location in iOS?

To make a reminder, start by turning on "At a Location" and then choose when I arrive instead of the default when I leave. Sometimes I have poor location signal and the alarm may go off, but that seems to happen very rarely in practice. When that happens, I just set it to when you leave. That seems to be less sensitive to radius so when it goes off, I then remember to change it back to arrival.

The deeper question of how location really works and is implemented is not publicly disclosed. As an end user, you can't set radius or other parameters that affect the location engine. It is either off or on. You either have the radios on or off.

I would encourage you to get Xcode and play with some of the demonstration projects to learn how location works in the iOS simulator and perhaps you can gain a better understanding of how iOS presents this data to apps.

There isn't a lot you can do about holding it up to your wife's head, perhaps it isn't close enough. You will notice that if you try to fool the phone by holding it up to your had or arm siri will not activate.

As for the geofenced reminders, you need to have location services turned on for reminders.

You will also need to set the address in your contacts, so add your home and work address to your contact.

For troubleshooting you will really need to look into the apps you are trying to control from Siri, as Siri itself is not an app, it is part of iOS. It is each individual app that will need to be looked at when troubleshooting.

Remember that Siri is still in beta and you can expect some teething problems with it.