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Siri Experiencing Significant Outage

TexasTexan said:
You are absolutely correct it is there. However, I noticed that on the main page the 4s is shown, no beta is shown. When you go to the 4s page, no beta is mentioned. Just on the Siri page.

As another person mentioned, there is a whole lot of people that don't know what a beta is.

I guess Apple could have used that when the iPhone 4 had the supposed antenna issues. The antenna is still in beta, so don't worry....
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Yup! The battery problems that Apple acknowledges are due to the fact Siri is in beta too. The static/echo problems? Not Apple's fault. They released a beta program on the phone. Buyer's should have expected to have all of these issues because Apple clearly used the word "beta"....somewhere...at some time..
 
I watched the site ...no comments about Pete Townsends ' tirade, no comments about Siri until today.....I LOVE Fanboy posts ...keep 'em coming guys .

" My phone doesn't work"...

"But you are so privileged to have queued up like a sheep in the rain to own one of our wonderful "Shiny thing make it all better" Sir" .

Clothes? of course I'm wearing clothes..Apple told me I am .

But I do miss the Real Emperor .
 
Kaibelf said:
Steve wasn't involved? What a LIAR you are. You are seriously trying to say that the phone was designed, developed, tested, and manufactured in the MONTH that occurred between Steve stepping down and him dying? Maybe Google spends about 6 days putting together offerings, but your assertion is so absurd that I truly believe your post might be the single dumbest thing I have EVER read on this blog.
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Lol ... Ur calling me a liar. Were u there playing with Steve's *** the last few months to know for sure that he was actively working on this project?


http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20120919-64/steve-jobs-last-big-project-the-next-iphone/


Sorry fanboy .... Please take a few moments and go cry to your mommy now.
 
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Wow people will go til the end of time before they admit apple did anything wrong.
 
Let's be honest, Having to send data from your phone to some Siri HQ, then have the stuff beamed back to your phone is a very rotten way of doing something.

Do we think, in time when the phone's have more power it might all be done in the phone and not shipped out across the airwaves?

Come to think of it, just what can Siri actually do without any connection?
Can it even read an email to you?
 
mcarthon said:
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Wow people will go til the end of time before they admit apple did anything wrong.
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if you use "wrong" and "apple" in one sentence, then you are "saying it wrong".

;)
 
Collected said:
Maybe it's just me being too critical but I'm not sure a company as large as Apple should be releasing a key feature on a phone in a beta stage of development. I mean they sold SIRI as a key selling point and a reason to buy the iPhone 5.. yet it's still in beta? Hmm..
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I have said this too, and agree with you on this. Made me wonder why Apple did this very uncharacteristic thing. Then I saw a recent Forbes interview with one of Siri's initial investors who even pointed out that A1pple never releases anything in "beta" form. From what I gather from the things he said, Apple is actually using the beta stage to train Siri through accumulation of data on questions being asked. He implied that they need a plethora of crowd-sourced training data to make Siri work really well. He said in a year or two we would likely be amazed at what Siri could do.
 
WannaGoMac said:
This is why the 3GS voice command being built in was better.

Both siri AND voice dictation are offline now.
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It wasn't better though. I doubt many people are really dedicated to the old voice command. It was too annoying to use regularly once the novelty wore off.

Siri has the serious potential to be far more useful beyond the novelty. Problems like this could kill it, but not if they get them fixed.

I would rather have Siri most of the time rather than the old voice command all the time.
 
Collected said:
Maybe it's just me being too critical but I'm not sure a company as large as Apple should be releasing a key feature on a phone in a beta stage of development. I mean they sold SIRI as a key selling point and a reason to buy the iPhone 5.. yet it's still in beta? Hmm..
Click to expand...

It's somewhat ironic. Apple seems to have more polished releases than competitors and supporters are quick to make that point. They finally release something prematurely and they acknowledge it by calling it beta.

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rwilliams said:
It really is surprising to see Apple having so much trouble with Siri. Even more surprising is that they would release a key feature of a new device while it's still in beta, though I suppose it's nearly impossible to scale properly for such a feature without having a lot of people using it at once.
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This is a good point, and would explain why apple would make such an uncharacteristic move

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FASE said:
When you turn off Siri all the other internal commands get turned back on. And are obviously much snappier! :)
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Brilliant point!

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Blorzoga said:
Anyone who bought a 4S mainly because of Siri is foolish. It's nothing more than a gimmick. I find it hard to believe that a temporary outage would cause a major hardship for anyone
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It has been very useful and not having it dampens my productivity. Believe or not, but for you, I'm sure no proof is enough.
 
Siri is in beta so outages like this are acceptable.

However, with that said, Apple should not be promoting it in 30 second ads or posting it on the front page of their website.
 
Clown Boy said:
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Apple = Fail
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Tim Cook....the man that destroyed Apple?? Lol man....you really have a problem.....how has he destroyed anything....he has been running stuff for years now, and nothing has been destroyed...Cook IMO is doing just fine, as he has been for years, and will continue to for more to come.
 
Ok, I think some people need to take a break and while it seems that some people have become experts on voice recognition they need to get reacquainted with it: How Voice Recognition Works

As for people "defending" Apple, I think it's just a natural occurrence to do that as people seem to find the time to come to a Mac blog to point an interruption in an Apple service - I hope the same people were just as critical last night when Google pushed out that perfectly working Gmail app.

I think, and this is just a guess, why Siri was released in "Beta" form was because it needs a lot of human interaction in order to learn and become better. That's the whole beauty of Siri in the first place - you don't need to be an engineer to know the right formula to ask something - you just ask like any normal person - and you can't do that without releasing the product to a greater population.

I think what people miss is that Siri is not an integral part, at least right now, for the iPhone to work. I've seem some funny things comparing this to the Blackberry outage - but you can still get your emails, you can still iMessage, and you can still do everything that is critical to the phone.

While I'm sure some here are getting their kicks ready to jump at any mis-step that Apple makes - but really, in the grand scheme of things - we're a nice happy 4 million strong focus group to something that has the potential to become really awesome.
 
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BC2009 said:
I have said this too, and agree with you on this. Made me wonder why Apple did this very uncharacteristic thing. Then I saw a recent Forbes interview with one of Siri's initial investors who even pointed out that A1pple never releases anything in "beta" form. From what I gather from the things he said, Apple is actually using the beta stage to train Siri through accumulation of data on questions being asked. He implied that they need a plethora of crowd-sourced training data to make Siri work really well. He said in a year or two we would likely be amazed at what Siri could do.
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Well said
 
Network Apps = Bad

This is exactly why I don't like having systems dependent on network based apps. No network connection and the device loses its functionality. Siri should be built into the device.
 
pubwvj said:
This is exactly why I don't like having systems dependent on network based apps. No network connection and the device loses its functionality. Siri should be built into the device.
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Reminds me of the original iPhone "apps", all web based and useless when no coverage because you could not get to the internet to load them. I understand the siri internet usage and don't mind much. Also still in beta, maybe they are improving the servers?
 
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It seems like back-end services are the Achilles heel of Apple. I made the mistake of renting a movie from my AppleTV the other night instead of getting it from my cable on-demand service, and lost 40 minutes waiting the movie to start, angrily trying to troubleshoot instead of relaxing. I don't know if it's simple incompetence, or if they just aren't willing to spend enough money to have a robust infrastructure. I love their hardware and software design, but of they want to make the cloud part of their products they need to be competitive with companies like Amazon and Google.
 
BC2009 said:
I have said this too, and agree with you on this. Made me wonder why Apple did this very uncharacteristic thing. Then I saw a recent Forbes interview with one of Siri's initial investors who even pointed out that A1pple never releases anything in "beta" form. From what I gather from the things he said, Apple is actually using the beta stage to train Siri through accumulation of data on questions being asked. He implied that they need a plethora of crowd-sourced training data to make Siri work really well. He said in a year or two we would likely be amazed at what Siri could do.
Click to expand...

It's a chicken and egg thing. In order to improve voice recognition, the system needs a lot of data from people speaking to it, however, until it gets that data, people will be reluctant to use it. Apple got it to a point where it's acceptable for many, and released it so that it becomes a lot better over time.
 
And this sort of thing is why I think the world is not quite ready for The Cloud. These sort of outages (ask a Blackberry owner about outages!) and broadband contracts with download limits.

However, I also think that there's no progress without a reason to do so. We'd still be using floppy discs if the original iMac, and other computers from that era hadn't omitted them. Broadband and internet service reliability will be driven forwards by user demand. It's not quite there just yet.
 
Siri is having problems in the US, but not in the UK
Siri is a woman in the US and a men in the UK
...
It's just that time of the month. Remember to pick up some tampons when you arrive at the store.
 
Unless they just added it, it does say beta.
 

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