How to turn off Siri on your iPhone or iPad

Turning Siri off on your iPhone will not automatically disable is on your Apple Watch, so you’ll have to do that separately if you want to ensure it’s off everywhere. You can also choose to leave Siri enabled on your iPhone but not your Apple Watch; Siri settings on the two devices are independent of one another.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your Apple Watch.

Step 2: Scroll down and select Siri.

Step 3: On watchOS 10 or later, choose Listen for and then select Off from the next screen.

On watchOS 9 or earlier, toggle off the switch beside Listen for “Hey Siri”.

Step 4: Toggle off the switches beside Raise to Speak and Press Digital Crown.

Step 5: On the next screen, scroll down and select Turn Off Siri to confirm.

You can also find the same settings by opening the Watch app on the iPhone that’s paired to your Apple Watch and selecting Siri.

Siri has gotten better at recognizing the “Hey Siri” key phrase that’s used to activate it with your voice. In fact, it’s gotten so good that Apple added the ability in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and watchOS 10 to shorten that by omitting the “Hey” and just saying “Siri” by itself.

However, it’s still not perfect, and your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch can sometimes think you’re calling for Siri during normal conversations — and the shorter wake word won’t necessarily help with that.

Thankfully, it’s easy enough to adjust or disable this aspect of Siri without turning the virtual assistant off entirely. Here’s how.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, or the Watch app on your iPhone to adjust this on your Apple Watch.

Step 2: Select Siri & Search.

Step 3: If you’re running iOS 17, iPadOS17, or watchOS 10, or later versions, select Listen for at the top. On the next screen, choose Off to disable waking Siri by voice entirely.

Alternatively, you can select “Hey Siri” to change it to listen only for the full “Hey Siri” phrase like it did in prior versions of iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. This can help reduce the chance of waking Siri up inadvertently when you’re not calling for it.

Step 4: If you’re running iOS 16, iPadOS 16, or watchOS 9, or earlier, your only choice is to toggle off Listen for “Hey Siri” entirely.

Step 5: If you’ve turned this off entirely, your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch will no longer listen for the key phrase, but you’ll still be able to activate Siri on-demand by pressing and holding the side button on your iPhone or iPad, or the Digital Crown on your Apple Watch. You can also still raise your wrist to speak to Siri on your watch as long as you’ve left that option enabled.

Step 6: If you wish to turn “Hey Siri” on again in the future, you can simply repeat the above steps; just be aware that you’ll have to retrain Siri for your voice by saying a few sample phrases.

Among Apple’s recent improvements to Spotlight are Siri Suggestions. Siri now makes suggestions for things like calling into a meeting, confirming an appointment, creating an email, searching Safari, and other actions based on your daily routine and how you use your apps. You are in control of how those suggestions appear — or not.

If you usually find Siri Suggestions helpful but want to switch some or all of them off, here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and select Siri & Search.

Step 2: Scroll down and toggle off Allow Notifications, Show in App Library & Spotlight, Show When Sharing, or Show When Listening. You can choose any combination of those switches or all of them to adjust the corresponding features.

Step 3: You can further fine-tune your Siri preferences by scrolling down and turning Siri suggestions off just for specific apps. For example, if you don’t want Siri to provide you with suggestions related to Safari, select Safari.

How to turn off Siri iCloud sync

Siri makes extensive use of machine learning to personalize its responses to your life and habits. As Siri gets more familiar with you, it should get more efficient and useful each time you call it up.

You can use iCloud to sync Siri’s machine-learning intelligence across all of your Apple devices. This is normally enabled by default if you opt into iCloud sharing features when setting up your iPhone or iPad, but you can switch it off at any time from your iCloud settings if you’d prefer to keep what Siri’s learned about you stored only on your local device.

Step 1: Open the iPhone or iPad Settings app and select your name at the top.

Step 2: Select iCloud.

Step 3: Select Show All.

Step 4: Scroll down, find Siri, and toggle it off.

If you later change your mind, you can easily turn any Siri functions back on by reversing the steps described above.

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