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One of the most hyped improvements in the new iPhone 4S was the Siri voice assistant service. The service requires a connection to Apple servers to work. Yesterday the Siri servers went down because of high load
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During the Apple Event on October 4th, Apple spent most of the iPhone 4S time (21 out of 36 minutes) talking about the great Siri feature. How this could improve human to computer interaction via voice commands. We just wanted to mention this just to highlight what Apple think is of importance with the new iOS 5 and iPhone 4S. The demonstration of Siri happened exactly 10 days before the iPhone 4S was available in stores, and what Apple showed the audience back then was a Siri service still running in Beta. The Siri system was not ready for launch. Apple managed to get it up and running in 10 days, but now it seems it was not completely ready after all. Update: Siri is still in Beta.
Yesterday, several tweets on Twitter indicated that something was really wrong with the Siri service. Tweeters got frustrated but there was no where to look for help. "Siri is down for me.. instead of unhelpful error message, voice transcription is silently failing. Nice". From what we have found out Siri was unavailable for several hours. This is the second fault with iPhone 4S during this week. We had the battery drain issue yesterday and now the unavailable Siri. The battery issue was solved with an iOS update which will be released soon. Because not everyone had problems with this random bug, Apple could not communicate much around the issue before they were 100% sure that this was a iOS problem and not any third-party app. This is not a fault requiring immediate solution, and such software bugs will be found in future releases as well. It is nothing to being heated about.  Siri being unavailable is another story. Apple must have known that one of their major online services was out of order. Failing to inform their customers about this and the expected time before it will be back online is ignorant from a large company. Apart from the now deceased Steve Jobs, no-one at Apple is allowed to communicate anything about Apple products. The products should talk for them self. Any they are, according to Apple, amazing, revolutionary and impressive. No need for human invention in the communication between Apple products and the consumers. Apple is one of the biggest tech companies now, so the strategy surely works and most of the time that is OK. But when things don't work as expected, someone over at Apple must get down from the high horse and actually talk to their customers. Apple has clearly something to learn from the other mobile phone manufactures. For example: LG, Nokia, Samsung Mobile, Sony Ericsson, HTC all have blogs, global and local Facebook and Twitter accounts where issues like the Siri outage would have been mentioned. 

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Posted: 2011-11-04 17:44:49
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Siri is still in Beta. This has been made clear from the start and they are constantly improving it which is why the system cannot yet find businesses etc outside US yet.

See the official Siri page here where it clearly says "Beta"


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Posted: 2011-11-04 17:53:04
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Something that's in Beta is being asked too much of it & obviously over loading. Perhaps they should have not released it until it was fully ready. Or would that have affected the 4s sales if Siri was not on the 4s??
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Posted: 2011-11-04 17:56:37
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Nevertheless. It's the first time I have seen a Beta release from Apple. Google on the other hand is famous for releasing beta services. Gmail was running in Beta for over 5 years. You still expect these services to be available even though it's a Beta service don't you?

Releasing Siri as a Beta services is not typical Apple. They tend to have everything polished and thoroughly tested before being released to the public. Maybe things are changing so fast these days that it is little time left for testing?
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Posted: 2011-11-04 18:16:53
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I'm sure some people bought the 4S partly due to Siri.
I love it and it works almost flawlessly and I use it many times a day, though perhaps not so much in public!
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Posted: 2011-11-04 18:18:00
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@bono, I read an article recently which had made up a poll of questions asked to fans waiting outside London's flagship Apple store, and the majority of people were looking most forward to siri over the A5 chip and 8MP camera. I think it was an extremely important part of the 4S and one Apple pushed quite a lot (as the article says above, 21 out of 36 minutes talking about it). They probably knew they needed something else other then a better camera and dual core, if they wanted people to upgrade to the 4S and not stick with the 4 (or upgrade to the 4).

But everyone knows how good Apple are at shouting and exaggerating the uniqueness and originality of their products (Facetime is a good example)

Plus it's racist
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Posted: 2011-11-04 18:20:22
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Siri is beta, and beta in the true sense of the word, not the google definition (gmail in "beta" for five years and many millions of users is a nonsense by google, nothing more). Beta software by definition *cannot* and should not be relied on, it's there for testing and demonstration, that's all. It will have bugs and it will, in the case of a cloud service like this, fall over once in a while - if they could guarantee it won't it wouldn't be beta, would it?
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Posted: 2011-11-04 19:58:34
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Och,if you try & say in a Scottish accent like Taggart it's murder it won't understand it I like that he says 12 O'clock & it answers what is treblecocck

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Posted: 2011-11-04 20:32:02
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Users of beta software are by definition called beta testers. Is that what iPhone 4S owners are? I do not think everyone who bought the 4S know that Siri is a beta feature. The difference between Gmail beta and Siri beta is the price you are paying for them. Gmail is "free" while the cost of Siri is built into the retail price.
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Posted: 2011-11-04 20:32:09
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Does Siri use much internet data though??

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Posted: 2011-11-04 20:38:35
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