Not only will the ever-loyal Siri—you know, Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant for iPhone and iPad—cheerfully read your email, set alarms, deliver weather reports and generally be at your beck and call, she’ll even change the sound of her voice if you ask her to. In addition to changing the gender of Siri’s voice, you can also give her a different accent, teach her a new language or even ask her to keep quiet unless you’re using a headset.

The first step: tap Settings, Siri & Search. You can also ask Siri to “change the sound of your voice”; when you do, she’ll give you a shortcut to her voice settings.

1. Change the gender of Siri’s voice

Want to change the sound of Siri’s voice from female to male, or back to female again? Tap the Siri Voice setting (Settings, Siri & Search, Siri Voice), then pick “Male” or “Female” under the Gender heading.

You can change the gender of Siri’s voice or even give her a new accent.

2. Give Siri a new accent

You’ll probably find the Accent setting just above the Gender heading; I say “probably” because not all of Siri’s known languages offer different accents. In English, for example, you can choose between American, Australian, and British accents. If Siri’s speaking French, though, there won’t be any alternate accents to choose from.

Related: 5 tasks that Siri does better than your fingertips can

3. Ask Siri to speak a different language

Speaking of languages, Siri is fluent in everything from Arabic and Chinese to Russian and Turkish. Just back up to the main Siri screen (under Settings, Siri& Search), tap Language, and pick one.

4. Decide how much Siri gets to speak

By default, Siri will speak aloud at all times, even when your device is switched to silent mode. Want to make a change? Easy.

Set Siri’s Voice Feedback setting to “Hands-Free Only” if you want Siri to be quiet most of the time.

Just tap Voice Feedback from the main Siri settings screen, You’ve got three settings to choose from: Always, meaning Siri will speak aloud whenever you talk to her; Control with Ring Switch, which will keep Siri quiet whenever the ring switch is set to “silent”; and Hands-Free Only, which means you’ll only hear Siri’s voice when you’re using a headset. If you want Siri to keep quiet most of the time, go for the Hands-Free Only option.

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Hi Susanne! Happy to hear that my iPhone tips have been helpful—and hey, now I’ll know what it means when someone says “Slán!” at the pub.

Just tap and hold a letter key to see all the available accent marks.

So, how do you add accent marks to letters as you’re typing on your iPhone? It’s simple, actually.

Tap and hold a specific letter (say, the letter “a”) and a pop-up menu of accent marks will appear—everything from acute (“á”) and grave (“à”) accents to umlauts (“ä”) and tildes (“ã”).

How do you select the accent mark you want? The trick is to keep holding the letter key you first tapped, then slide your fingertip to the correct symbol and release.

If you lift your finger from the touchscreen keypad and then try to tap the accent-mark key, the menu of accent marks will disappear before you can tap it.

Bonus tip

Tapping and holding a key isn’t just for typing accent marks; it’ll also work for symbol keys. Tap and hold the dollar sign, for example, and you’ll get a menu with signs for the yen (“¥”), the pound (“£”), the euro (“€”), and the cent (“¢”).

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One way to get the message back is to return to the Mailboxes screen (tap the Back button in the top-left corner of the display), open the right mail account, tap the Trash mailbox, then scroll through and look for the message you accidentally deleted. If you get a lot of e-mails, finding the right message could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Want to undelete an accidentally trashed mail message? Just give your iPhone a shake.

Luckily, there’s a much easier way to recover deleted emails, assuming you catch your mistake quickly enough.

The secret: just give your iPhone a shake.

When you do, an “Undo Trash” pop-up will appear. Tap “Undo,” and the message you just deleted will jump back into your Mail inbox.

Yes, it’s the same trick as shaking your iPhone to undo your typing—except in this case, the action we’re undoing is trashing a mail message.

But there’s a catch

However… the iPhone’s shake-to-undo feature only works for the last action you took.

That means if you want to recover a deleted email by shaking your iPhone, deleting the message must have been the last thing you did. If, instead, you trashed an e-mail and then began typing a new message, shaking your iPhone will only delete what you just typed, leaving your deleted message lost in the trash.

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Luckily, there’s another option if you want to zoom the display on your iPhone or iPad: putting a virtual magnifying glass on the screen.

Just turn on iOS’s Window Zoom setting to put a virtual magnifying glass on your iPhone or iPad display.

The so-called “window zoom” mode for the iOS zoom feature puts a resizable window on the screen. Inside the window, the display is zoomed; outside, the screen is normal size. Dragging the window around the screen feels just like you’re using a magnifying glass.

Let’s Get Started

To get started, tap Settings, General, Accessibility, Zoom, then switch the main Zoom toggle on. If the entire screen suddenly zooms way in, don’t panic; just double-tap with three fingertips to go back to the normal view, or triple-tap with three fingertips to bring up the Zoom menu.

You can change the size and shape of the zoom window by tapping Resize Lens from the Zoom menu.

Next, scroll down to the Zoom Region setting, tap it, and select Window Zoom; when you do, a window showing a zoomed-in portion of the screen should appear. (If it doesn’t, try double-tapping the display with three fingertips again.)

To move the magnifying glass around the screen, just tap, hold, and drag one of the edges. To make the window bigger or smaller, triple-tap the screen with three fingertips to make the Zoom menu appear, tap the Resize Lens option, then drag the edges of the window to change its size and shape. When you’re done resizing, tap anywhere outside the window.

Just triple-tap with three fingertips to reveal the Zoom menu.

Want to change the magnification of the zoom? Double-tap anywhere on the screen with three fingertips, but hold your fingers on the screen on that second tap; then, just slide your three fingertips up to zoom in, or down to zoom out. If that doesn’t work, triple-tap with three fingertips, then use the magnification slider in the pop-up Zoom menu.

When you’re ready to make the magnifying glass disappear, double-tap with three fingertips anywhere on the screen. To get the magnifying glass back, just do the three-finger double-tap again.

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Hi Lorraine! You’ve touched on a sore point when it comes to the iOS Mail app, which lacks an obvious way to delete all messages without tapping Edit and then selecting each message one by one.

Personally, I’d love it if you could, say, tap, hold and swipe to select a bunch of messages at once (similar to what you can do in the Photos app), but alas, that doesn’t work in iOS Mail.

The “Trash All” button doesn’t appear in the All Mailboxes view of the iOS Mail app.

There is a way…

That said, there is a way to quickly delete all messages in the inbox of an individual mail account, or in a specific mailbox within an account. But if (like me) you’re a fan of the All Mailboxes view in Mail, the Trash All button is easy to miss.

For some odd reason, the Trash All button doesn’t appear in the All Mailboxes screen. Instead, you’ll need to back up (tap the Mailboxes button with the arrow in the top-left corner of the display) and tap on the inbox of a specific mail account.

Once you’ve arrived at an individual account inbox, tap the Edit button to reveal the Trash All button (it’s in the bottom corner of the screen). Tap it, then tap the confirmation button to delete all the messages in the inbox.

Deleting all messages from a specific mailbox

You can also delete all messages with a specific mailbox within a mail account. Go back to the main Mailboxes screen, tap a mail account under the Accounts heading, tap a mailbox, then tap Edit and Trash All to delete all the messages in the mailbox.

No, the Trash All method isn’t as elegant as being able to swipe to select a bunch of messages at once, but it’s better than nothing.

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A simple iOS Mail search will yield all e-mail messages that contains the person’s name, whether it appeared in the “From” field or not.

As you type, you’ll see possible matches appear below under the “People” heading; if you see a matching name or email address, go ahead and tap it.

Luckily, there is a way to search only the “From” line—or the “To” or “Subject” lines, for that matter—of your email messages. Like many things in iOS these days, the method isn’t immediately obvious.

• First, tap the search box in Mail (drag down a bit on your inbox to reveal it, if necessary), then tap in the name.
• As you type, you’ll see possible matches appear below under the “People” heading, including the names of people in your iOS contacts as well as email addresses of folks with whom you’ve traded mail messages. If you see a matching name or email address, go ahead and tap it—and when you do, the name will jump into the search box, outlined in gray.
• Now, tap the name once more, and you’ll see three new tabs appear: From, To, and Message. Since we want to see all the email messages we’ve received from the contact, we’ll tap From. You can also tap To to see see only the messages you’ve sent to the contact, or Message to see everything.

You can also search only the subject line of your iOS mail messages.

Want to search only the subject line of your mail messages? Try this…

• Go back to the search box, tap in a name, a word, or anything you want. As you type, you’ll see (again) a list of possible subject matches beneath the search box. Go ahead and tap a match, or simply tap “Search for [what you just typed]” directly under the search field.
• Your search phrase will pop into the search box, once again outlined in gray. Tap the phrase to reveal a pair of tabs: Subject and Message. Tap Subject to find messages with your search phrase in the subject line.

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Sure, you could tap the “Select All” button, but there’s no obvious way to select a smaller series of images without tapping them one at a time. “Select all on screen” isn’t an option in the Photos app, for example, nor is trying to pinch the screen or tap two or more snapshots at once.

You can select a second batch of pictures in the iOS Photos app after selecting a first batch.

That said, there is a trick to selecting a bunch of images at once, but you’ll need to do it just right. In fact, it took me several tries to master the technique.

First, go to one of your photo albums, a “moment,” or a shared album, then tap the Select button in the top corner of the screen.

Next, starting from the first photo you want to select, tap, hold, then swipe to the left or right.

When you do, you’ll select every photo your fingertip swipes—and once you’ve started, you can swipe up or down, left or right. Move your fingertip to the very top or bottom of the screen and you’ll keep selecting as you scroll.

Now, try this; let go of the screen, scroll up or down a tiny bit, then tap and swipe left or right again to select a different batch of pictures.

Having trouble with the swipe-to-select trick? I was too until I figured something out: once you tap your first picture, you must swipe either right or left; swiping up or down won’t work.

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You can add the Kindle store to your iPhone or iPad home screen in just a few taps.

The handy tip comes from here’s the thing readers Joshua and Candice, who point out that an iPhone shortcut to the mobile-optimized  Amazon Kindle store “functions like an app would.”

Very true—and indeed, this tip will work for any web site you visit in Safari for iOS, not just the Kindle store.

First, open the Safari web browser on your iPhone, then type this URL into the address bar at the top of the screen:

http://www.amazon.com/kindlemobilestore

Now that you’ve reached the online  Amazon Kindle store, it’s time to create a home-page shortcut. Tap the “Action” button at the bottom of the screen (the one that looks like a square with an arrow pointing up), scroll through the bottom row of buttons and tap “Add to Home Screen.”

You can edit the name of the icon before you add it to your iOS home screen.

Next, you’ll see a preview of what your new home-screen icon will look like, and you’ll also get a chance to name the icon. Just tap the little “x” to clear out the name field and type your own (such as “Kindle store”).

Tap the blue “Add” button, and presto—you now have an Amazon Kindle store shortcut on your iPhone or iPad home screen, which you can move or organize into a folder. (I went ahead and added it to a new folder with my Kindle reader app.)

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My first thought was to simply drop the receipt in her purse, but then I had a better idea—one that wouldn’t involve keeping track of a tiny, easy-to-lose scrap of paper.

You can easily attach a file on your Mac to an event in the Calendar app.

First, I took the receipt and scanned it into my iPhone using a free, third-party scanning app, then I sent the scan of my dry-cleaning receipt to my Mac. In my case, I used Dropbox to send the scan from my iPhone to my iMac, but you could also send it via Message, Mail, Airdrop (which lets you share documents between newer, Bluetooth-connected Macs and iOS devices) or iCloud Drive. Just open the scanned document on your iPhone, then tap the Action button (the square one with the arrow) for some sharing options.

Once I had the scanned receipt sitting on my Mac, I added a “Pick up dry cleaning!” event to my wife’s shared iCloud calendar, clicked the “Add Notes or Attachments” field (it’s just below the alarms and “Add Invitees” option), then clicked the “Add Attachment” button.

Doing so opened a Finder window and within that window, I found the scanned receipt, selected it, and clicked the Open button to attached the scan to the calendar event.

You can open (but not add, unfortunately) Calendar attachments on an iPhone or iPad.

The calendar event and attachment automatically synced to my wife’s iCloud-connected iPhone. All she had to do was open the event, tap on the attachment, and the receipt appeared on her screen. No need to fish around in her purse for a crumpled up scrap of paper.

Of course, a PDF scan isn’t the only thing you could attach to a calendar event; you could attach a photo, a Word document, or even an MP3 if you wanted to.

My only complaint, though, is that while you can open a calendar event and attachment on an iPhone or iPad, you can’t add an attachment to an event directly from an iOS device. Why not? Good question.

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Believe it or not, photo albums are still a thing in the iOS Photos app, and they’re relatively easy to create and manage.

Just select a few photos, then tap “Add To” to shuffle them into an album.

Let’s begin by selecting some photos and adding them to an album…

• Launch the Photos app from your iPhone’s or iPad’s home screen, tap the Albums tab, select All Photos, then tap Select.
• Now, it’s time to pick some photos. Tap a few—as many as you like—then press the “Add To” button at the bottom (on an iPhone) or top (on an iPad) of the screen.
• Next, you’ll see a list of albums into which you can shuffle your selected photos. Go ahead and tap one (the grayed-out albums, like Panoramas, Videos, and Screenshots, are automatically created and managed by the Photos app)—and when you do, the photos you selected will fly directly into the album. Done.
• Another option: scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap “New Album.”

Want to create a new photo album first and then start adding photos to it? No problem.

• From the Album screen, tap the “+” button sitting on the top-left corner of the screen.
• Name your new photo album and tap “Save.”
• Time to select photos, starting with images from your Moments. Tap some snapshots to select them, then tap Done when you’re finished. If you don’t want to browse Moments for photos, you can always tap the Albums tab to select images from one of your albums, including All Photos.

To add photos to an existing album, tap Select, then Add.

You can also open an existing photo album and add photos to it…

• Tap the Albums tab, then open an album by tapping it.
• Tap Select, then Add, then pick some photos from Moments, Collections, or from the albums tab.
• When you’re finished selecting pictures, tap Done.

Last but not least, you can rearrange or delete your photo albums whenever you like.

• On an iPhone, tap the Albums tab, tap Edit, then tap the red button to the left of an album to delete it, or drag the three-line “handle” to the right of an album to move it up or down.
• On an iPad, go to the Albums tab, tap Edit, then drag a photo album to rearrange it, or tap the little “x” on an album to delete it. (The grayed-out, auto-generated albums can’t be moved or deleted.)
• Oh, and one more thing: Keep in mind that you can delete an album without trashing the photos inside it.

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