Use Siri to Dial Vanity Phone Numbers

My brother accidentally discovered a handy Siri trick this week while dealing with car insurance in the aftermath of a hail storm. When it came time for him to call 1-800-PROGRESSIVE and figure out his claim, for whatever reason he decide to say "Hey Siri, call 1-800-PROGRESSIVE" instead of dialing by hand...and it worked like a charm.*

Turns out, Siri can natively convert vanity phone numbers (or "phonewords") into their appropriate digits and make the phone call with no need to dust off your T9 texting talent. Need to call 1-800-FLOWERS or 1-800-CONTACTS, but can’t see those tiny letters without your contacts? Siri has you covered. And to be sure that it wasn't just Siri pulling the web results for notable brands, I asked Siri to call a few random 7-digit 1-800 numbers (like 1-800-ACTUARY and 1-800-SUNFISH) with each one working just as well as any major company's vanity digits.

Naturally, Siri still manages to drop the call ball in certain edge-cases; when I asked to call 877-CASH-NOW, Siri instead dialed 877-2274...immediately. Similarly, 877-KARS4KIDS failed to go through — this time throwing up an unhelpful "Sorry, you'll need to open the Phone app" alert. I assume that the interstitial 4 throws off whatever word recognition is going on here. Even so (like so many of Siri’s uses), the 70% success rate is still pretty handy when you need it.

* Attentive readers will note that "1-800-PROGRESSIVE" does not map neatly onto Progressive's customer service number of 1-800-776-4737, being well over seven digits. It turns out, the phone system natively truncates numbers in excess of 11 digits (including the +1 country code), ignoring any characters entered afterwards — neat!