One of the things you’re frequently doing when planning your Disney World trip is calculating dates. (When is 180 days before the first day of my trip? When is 60 days before the first day of my trip?, etc…) Over the years, I’ve tried various options (TouringPlans’s Dashboard, Wolfram Alpha’s Professional Assistant App, and I even wrote my own date calculation program), but none of them were easy as I wanted the process to be. Enter, Siri.
“Hey Siri, what’s 180 days before April 20?”
“It’s Saturday, October 22, 2016.”
Siri Date Example
Boom. Done. It’s so simple. Why would I ever bother to do date calculations any other way? (I can also ask Siri to make appointment on my calendar or set a reminder for me, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.)
NOTE: Sadly, my beloved Alexa cannot handle this kind of date calculation (which bummed me out.) Also, Google’s “Ok, Google” assistant seemed to be able to handle the “in the future” calculation (e.g., “What is 60 days from now?”), but couldn’t handle the “days before” type of requests that are so common when doing Disney-related planning (e.g, “What is 60 days before April 20?”). Microsoft’s Cortana cannot do it either, but I don’t know anyone who uses her (except when playing Halo.)
