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Siri, Google Calendar and Unexpected Invitee Emails

Nov 18, 2011   //   by David   //   Blog, iOS5 Tips and Tricks  //  7 Comments

I love my iPhone 4S. I love Siri. I love Google Calendar.

However, using Google Calendar there doesn’t seem to be a way of turning off the automatic invite email that gets sent when you tell Siri to “Schedule a meeting with [person's name] on Monday at 10am”. If the the person is in your contacts with an email address they are added as an invitee and Google Calendar automatically emails them the invite. Of course, there are ways around this by changing what you tell Siri but that misses the point of the intuitive nature of Siri and impacts it’s usefulness.

I’ve had a few emails go out to unexpected invitees for tentative meetings I was just planning before contacting the client. I really wish Google would made the automatic sending of invite emails a setting based feature.

If you know of a fix, add-on or workaround that includes leaving the name of the person in the meeting request to Siri, please comment here. Of course, if I find anything on the web I’ll be sure to post it here too.

7 Comments

  • Hello: I’m curious — have you figured out a fix to this yet? It drives me nuts. Thanks.

    • Nothing yet. Most of the workarounds I’ve found take away the functionality that I want…adding the name of the person to the calender event. The emailing is coming from Google and if you look on their forums it’s a common request to have an account option added to toggle invites on/off.

      • Uch. driving me crazy too. any way to turn this off yet either on siri’s side or google’s?
        the only workaround i’ve found is to say “schedule lunch joe blo at 4pm” don’t way “with joe blo” and don’t say “meet” or “meeting” joe blo, but if you say “lunch” or “call” or something else, that seems to work.

        other question: how do i get siri to set an “alert” for that schedule entry (i.e. ‘alert 15 minutes before’)?
        thanx

        • It’s a Google issue, and there are lots of posting on their boards about making this a setting. Unfortunately, nothing yet.

          Funny, when I tried to say “schedule lunch with [name]” it still sent out an invitee email.

          As for the alerts, at the moment Siri doesn’t set alerts but you can setup default alerts times. On your iPhone go to Settings-> Mail, Contacts, Calender -> Default Alert Times (down near the bottom under Calendar) and set the default alert time for events to 15 minutes. Not a perfect solutions…but a good workaround.

          • Sorry if i was unclear, don’t say “With” and don’t say “meet” or “meeting”, so you would say “schedule lunch [name]” and that seems to work as a workaround for me.

            and yes, aware of the default alarm, but i don’t want everything to have an alarm, just some things, so i’ll continue to edit siri’s work.
            ;-)

  • I don’t think this has anything to do with google. If so how? It seems just to be Siri. I don’t use a google calendar on my phone and my default email is not a gmail account.

    They have to know this is an issue I wonder when they will give us some options with Siri??

    • When you schedule a meeting with [name], Siri adds them to your invitees list. In the case of Google, invitees automatically get sent an invite email when the calendar event is created. However, If you manually create a meeting in google calendar you can add invitees and opt not to email them. Other calendar services have similar functionality which you may be able to turn off. So far Google hasn’t added any settings that would help with Siri.

      If you are using another calendar, like iCal, you might want to check and see if you have a setting to turn off invitee emails.

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