Siri, the virtual assistant built into your iPhone. She can test your patience at the best of times.

The knowledge navigator has been described as many things – sassy, rude, annoying and, at worst, completely useless.

But what if, with a tweak here and there, Siri could aid productivity?

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For Siri to help you lead a more efficient life, all you need to do is invest a little bit of time to set systems in place, and you’ll be wondering how you ever got by without her.

The ‘intelligent’ voice-activated assistant can answer thousands of commands, but it seems more often than not, Siri does not understand us. For this reason, it’s easy to dismiss Siri as a piece of technology that is years away from ‘real life’ usefulness.

Here are six tips to revolutionise your relationship.

1. Teach Siri discretion

If you don’t want everyone at your local café witnessing your interactions with Siri, there’s a discreet alternative.

Hold down the home button until Siri pops up and then hold your phone to your ear like you’re making a call. Her voice will come out of the earpiece, like a normal call, rather than the speaker.

This may take a bit of practice but it does work.

2. Integrate Siri into your life

Like most relationships, Siri requires a bit of time, patience, and most importantly, consistency. Be persistent.

While it is tempting to give up on Siri when she fails, if you establish a habit and use her every day, soon you’ll find you are saving a lot of time writing emails, text messages and finding contacts.

Apple claims that the more you use Siri, the better she understands your accent. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but you can manually correct words she doesn’t understand.

After speaking, check the speech box for accuracy. Any words Siri can’t understand will be underlined. Click on the word and a number of alternatives will pop up.

In the worst-case scenario, you can manually enter the word. While this may seem tedious, you’ll find that in no time, Siri will understand your commands perfectly due to the past corrections you’ve made.

3. Set up your Contacts properly

Let Siri know about the most important relationships in your life. Whether it’s your daughter, father, beautician, lawyer or accountant, Siri can connect them to you quickly.

For example, say to Siri ‘John Smith is my dad’ or ‘Jaalal Mill is my publicist’ then reply ‘yes’ when Siri asks you to confirm.

Siri will form these connections and then all you have to say is ‘call my dad’ or ‘message my publicist’ and Siri will do just that. Make sure the exact name you say to Siri already exists in contacts.

4. Manage your calendar

When it comes to managing your events, Siri is a lot smarter than you may realise.

The key is to understand how to command Siri when setting, rescheduling or cancelling events. Commands that are too vague will be your downfall.

For example if you say ‘schedule a meeting’ Siri won’t know when, or with whom. If you say ‘Schedule a meeting with Jaalal Mills tomorrow at 3.30pm’, Siri will set this in your calendar, and even send Jaalal an email request.

Siri can also search your calendar, change details such as time and date, cancel appointments and alert you to event conflicts.

5. Play music or find out the name of songs

On command, Siri will play music. Simply ensure the artist is on your phone, and tell her to play. She will then shuffle tracks, but you have the ability to skip or play specific tracks.

Siri also intergrates with Shazam if you have iOS 8, so you can ask her identify songs for you during the day, and even buy them.

6. Add phonetic spelling

Try as you might, sometimes Siri is just not going to understand what you are saying. For the names she continues to stumble on click on the contact, select ‘edit’, scroll down to ‘add field’ and choose from ‘Phonetic First Name’ or ‘Phonetic Last Name’ depending on which is proving troublesome.

Enter the phonetic version of the name and save. Chances are, Siri will then have a handle on the name.

The road to happiness with Siri may have bumps along the way. You may sometimes argue, and she may give you responses that you don’t quite expect. At times, she may make you laugh.

With the right approach however, Siri can be the key more productive life.