Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me with bilingual dictation

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I just bought your Talking to Siri book on Amazon. Congratulations! I found very useful. I have a problem though: I mainly use Siri in French as most of my messages and email messages are in French. Sometimes I like to ask Siri Wolfram questions, so I must switch it to American English.

My question is the following: Is there a way of telling the French Siri that my next query will be in English? That would avoid the hassle of having to go to preferences, activate English, perform the query and then go back to preferences to switch Siri back to French.

Your loving nephew,

Andre

Dear Andre,

Unfortunately, there is no in-Siri command for voice assistance that switches languages. The only way is to hop out, switch in preferences, and hop back in.

There is, however, a work-around for multi-language dictation. Settings > General > International > Keyboards allows you to add keyboards, enabling the globe button. This button toggles directly between keyboard languages.

A simple tap takes you to the next language setting, including dictation. You can easily move from French to English and back as you dictate into any text entry element on your iPad.

Hopefully, Siri will support "Speak to me in French" requests in a future update.

Hugs,

Auntie T.