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I can understand it if Siri has to pull from the internet to get information like stocks or maps, but why does it have to make a connection back to Apple to create reminders or send text messages?

Because Siri is watching your every move. She's stalking you. Just kidding. Good question.
 
Pretty sure it's up, because I said "Are you having trouble connecting to the network?" and Siri said "I'm having trouble connecting to the network."
 
I'm guessing the connection is needed not to really preform the actions but when you say something to Siri it records the message and sends the actual voice recording to Apple's server to decipher you voice command into an action and meaning that is then sent back to the phone telling the phone what to do and how to respond.
 
Well, Siri is afterall a

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Hopefully she's down for an improvement.
 
It's very disappointing how flaky Siri is. It's hard to tout a feature that rarely works. Using the excuse that the phone just launched is not acceptable. If anything, it should work better now with limited 4S's out in the wild.

Absolutely not. You couldn't be more wrong. The servers went from nearly zero to four million new devices hammering it hard while everyone exhausts the new feature over and over and over again showing friends, family, etc and learning it themselves.


As the initial huge chunk of new 4S devices tapers off, new 4Ses are activated at a steady, lower rate, and people will get used to Siri and not use it as much. Also, I wouldn't doubt the servers are going to be getting periodic upgrades.


It's common sense for a new feature to be used way more during the period when it's new, and then taper off to normal use later on.
 
I can understand it if Siri has to pull from the internet to get information like stocks or maps, but why does it have to make a connection back to Apple to create reminders or send text messages?

I can see two possible reasons: In the process flow of handling a query, Siri first checks with its servers to validate the context and ensure there isn't a different meaning to the question being asked BEFORE it interprets it as a smaller question. This would improve response time on more complicated queries by spending time up front retrieving the relevant information to the complicated query rather than waiting for it to fail to answer your question appropriately, frustrating the end user.

If the network access is down, then it won't be able to answer your question accurately. How else would Siri be sure you aren't meaning something more complicated. Also, there's some question as to how much learning information is stored centrally so that instead of Siri storing everything it learns about question asking patterns locally, it centralizes them all so that the overall experience will improve over time for all users... instead of having these phones all amassing eventually gargantuan sets of data all in separate "siloed" environments.

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Absolutely not. You couldn't be more wrong. The servers went from nearly zero to four million new devices hammering it hard while everyone exhausts the new feature over and over and over again showing friends, family, etc and learning it themselves.


As the initial huge chunk of new 4S devices tapers off, new 4Ses are activated at a steady, lower rate, and people will get used to Siri and not use it as much. Also, I wouldn't doubt the servers are going to be getting periodic upgrades.


It's common sense for a new feature to be used way more during the period when it's new, and then taper off to normal use later on.

This sort of thing happened with activations and even 3G access for a day or so when Apple launched prior iPhones. Few carriers could anticipate the amount of demand on the initial day. And does anyone remember how many fanboys were calling this feature underwhelming and saying that the 4S will not sell very well? I'm sure sales will taper off but even fans didn't anticipate this taking off as abruptly as it did.

Give it a day before throwing the baby, the bathwater, the bathtub, the bathroom tile and the bathroom out. (not directed at your comment, but the people crying that siri is a total failure, etc. etc.)
 
Anyone else think it's very odd that none of the Mac news sites have written anything about this apparently major outage?

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Back up in Virginia.
 
It sounds like it's not an outage so much as it is overwhelming traffic... some people can get in now, and some still can't. It'll taper off, and in the meantime Apple will have collected some data suggesting what other steps they might take to manage peak traffic.

Apple has one of the most impressive globally load-balanced networks, folks... consider how robust iTunes is 99% of the time. But as you all know, the problem with being an internet nerd is that we tend to congregate in places where people don't get truly vocal until they're incensed about something. That can be said of society in general, but internet forums tend to focus a lot of abrupt rage in one place.

Apple always identifies problems, tweaks and improves (or discontinues quietly in the rare instance that something is an unmitigated failure). I can't say the same for a lot of their competitors.
 
Down for me too in westchester ny. Funny thing yesterday i asked Siri how are you today ? and it replied could be better. LOL
 
Down in CT all morning. (Too bad, I am dying to ask Siri, "Knock, knock.")
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yup long island
 
I don't know which is funnier: The fact that Apple's programmers installed quirky responses to reply to our random questions to Siri, OR the we actually ARE asking the questions!
 
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