Skip Siri, but use speech-to-text

In my experience, it is not easy to go through the entire process of sending a text message via Siri. It's frustrating, time-consuming, and has a (non-scientific) 50 percent failure rate. (To be fair, you can make Siri more efficient with some configurations.)

A more useful feature is speech-to-text within the Messages app. So, you do the work of selecting the recipient, but instead of typing your message, you speak it.

Go to a message thread and tap the text field. Then tap the microphone icon by the spacebar, wait a beat, and begin speaking your message.