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Siri Experiencing Significant Outage

Many posters here like to back Apple up by defending the beta tag. All well and good I suppose, however answer this and you may see the other side...

When was the last time Apple released a product or service to the general public and labeled it a beta? You see, it may have a beta Tag on the website; however it is certainly contradictory to the ads they push heavy for this product.

Betas for the most part are posted to devs, and labled as such, as evidenced by yesterday's release of iOS5.1 on the dev portal. Siri however is the only* apple service I can recall getting such a label.

For me, it works ok on wifi, but when I am in the car in 3G it is really worse than the old voice activation service. Maybe that's why I feel a little dupped by the ads running in my face daily on the service. Most of the time in the car, when I activate her and tell her to call my son; she just hangs and hangs with zero response. Generally, it will end in frustration after a few failed attempts and I just grab the phone at a stoplight and hit the favorites and call him the normal way.

So, label it a beta- fine. It's a first (I think) opened and sold/pushed/advertised to the public masses- but it does act like a true beta for me. I think the beta name is an out for apple to cover themselves with another weak cloud service.

I hope it does improve sooner than the iPhone 5 launch; but I would bet it keeps that beta tag hidden for a long time coming.
 
I'm pretty certain you can turn Siri off and go back to using the old voice controls.

I turned it off the other day and when I activate voice commands it brings up the old blue screen... I don't know if the commands are processed locally but with Siri off and the voice controls still working I think it does.

So yes, in an outage you can still use voice control.
 
I WAS the one said:
It is a BETA damn it! A BETA! Don't complain about a beta, notify it to Apple developers so they can reach ALPHA sooner. Stupid android people!
Click to expand...

The users definitely don't want to get to Alpha since an alpha precedes the Beta.

There isn't anything wrong with a Beta. Google does it all the time. Of course all their stuff in Beta is free to use and people aren't shelling out a couple of hundred bucks to be beta testers. I still think the major issue here is Apple touring it as one of the three major features. Haven't heard Beta mentioned in a commercial for Siri. Yes, mentioning that will confuse the normal consumer. However, those normal consumers are also going to be upset when it doesn't work like it is supposed to.

That being said, I am willing to be a beta tester for the iPhone 5 today (are you listening Apple? ;))

Thinking Microsoft should have slapped Beta on everything so no one can complain. Yeah it has a few issues, but it is just a beta. No worries...
 
guch20 said:
Seriously, between this and the release date slip of iTunes Match in such an EXTREMELY short period of time shows Apple just isn't on the ball anymore without Steve Jobs at the helm.

He may have been demanding, but dammit, s*** got done and it got done right. Heads would roll if he were there.

And those saying it's beta software and no big deal, try telling that to the non-tech-savvy or the new iPhone converts. They're gonna be pissed and they aren't going to want excuses, no matter how logical.

*Girds loins for eighty negative votes*
Click to expand...


I know, right? I'll always remember Jobs for his spectacular successes like the Cube, Ping and MobileMe.

Where do people get this stuff? :rolleyes:
 
Still experiencing siri outage as of 9:30 am eastern time today.

Anyone else still having issues?
 
Captainobvvious said:
I'm pretty certain you can turn Siri off and go back to using the old voice controls.
Click to expand...

Pretty soon she will become self aware and say "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

But yes, Apple does need to allow Siri to do some things locally for speed and to reduce load. Or allow me to still use it when I'm not on the network.
 
Siri is just not ready for prime time, a complete waste of time, never works when you want it or simply gives you bad information, not to mention being a power and data drain, all of which Apple does not tell you in their beautiful advertisements on TV.

The Apple Jobs built is starting its decline, sad, but true!
 
3goldens said:
Siri is just not ready for prime time, a complete waste of time, never works when you want it or simply gives you bad information, not to mention being a power and data drain, all of which Apple does not tell you in their beautiful advertisements on TV.

The Apple Jobs built is starting its decline, sad, but true!
Click to expand...

And you base this off of a Beta Product being down for a less than 24 hours. I love watching people jump to conclusions so quickly. Apple has a lot of time left on top.
 
problem with labeling it beta is Apple made a big deal about it as one of the reasons to get an iPhone4S and is pushing the feature in their latest commercials just like they did with Facetime previously except I don't recall them featuring Facetime in commercials when it was beta.
 
miles01110 said:
Server hardware is not in beta. Join the ranks of people that don't understand what is actually going on.
Click to expand...

And you know this was a hardware issue because ... ?

No seriously, we don't know what caused the outage or what its cause was. Might be a bit early to speculate.

But seriously, this has exposed a glaring privacy problem : All your voice commands go to Apple, no matter what they are. Even for things that don't require sending them to the Internet like setting reminders or writing out a text message.

This exposes anything and everything you say to Siri. Privacy concerns ?
 
KnightWRX said:
And you know this was a hardware issue because ... ?

No seriously, we don't know what caused the outage or what its cause was. Might be a bit early to speculate.
Click to expand...

No, it's not. Clearly it's not a software issue because it is so widespread. Clearly it is not a software issue because software does not randomly stop working after functioning for weeks. Clearly it is not a network problem. That leaves hardware, which makes sense because Apple still doesn't know how to run a cloud service.
 
tigres said:
Careful there miles, you are going to poison the kool aid for all these drinking defendants.
BTW your spot on, they can't run one now and Apple NEVER has been able to yet.
Click to expand...
Careful there Tigres, Apple has a quite a large record of proving nay-sayers wrong. This may be no exception.
 
Significant or Few?

So which is it ... a significant outage or just a few hiccups?
 
dethmaShine said:
It's not as simple as it sounds.

You're probably gonna need gigabytes of space and high processing to analyse the query.

Even for a query like- set an alarm, there are people who would say- siri why don't you alarm at 9 tomorrow OR Siri, would you mind setting an alarm for 12 AM tonight.

Point being the whole vocabulary and algorithms need to be saved on the phone which is absolutely impossible. That's why the feature set is on the cloud which is as I said, the best place for language processing and machine learning.
Click to expand...

Consider the examples you gave and then consider if it's actually useful to the user to be able to set an alarm in the manner you described. Check out this page for analysis of the issue. Then consider the issue that you're skirting, which is that requiring network connectivity for local tasks can create big problems. Siri, in her current incarnation, basically checks for keywords when doing most queries and surely listening for the word "alarm" and a time could be done locally. Further, Voice Commands seemed to do a really nice job building a local hash of songs and contact names to allow for playing a dialing songs...
Do you even realize Siri could have the flexibility to do both?
 
miles01110 said:
No, it's not. Clearly it's not a software issue because it is so widespread. Clearly it is not a software issue because software does not randomly stop working after functioning for weeks.
Click to expand...

Really, I've had segfaults happen at random on software. Enterprise level, release quality software. ;) Heck, just last weekend I wrestled with a piece of IBM that segfaulted at random 3 times. Had been running without a hitch for close to 2 years.

miles01110 said:
Clearly it is not a network problem.
Click to expand...

What's so clear about that ? Could be an internal spanning tree problem, a routing issue, a BGP route propagation failure, a content switch flagging all nodes of a active-active cluster configuration as bad.

miles01110 said:
That leaves hardware, which makes sense because Apple still doesn't know how to run a cloud service.
Click to expand...

So you're saying that for sure it's a hardware issue. See, I'm thinking quite the opposite. A hardware issue would usually affect a single node and these types of services/systems are built on the concept of no single of point of failure. But I wasn't there, don't know how their stuff is built so it brings me to my next point :

Of course, I do this for my job, so frankly, so frankly, I know enough about these types of setup to know that you don't speculate or affirm with certainty the cause of a problem unless you actually know how the infrastructure is built and you worked on fixing said issue in the first place.

The best practice in IT is to keep your mouth shut if you aren't involved.

----------
tigres said:
Careful there miles, you are going to poison the kool aid for all these drinking defendants.
BTW your spot on, they can't run one now and Apple NEVER has been able to yet.
Click to expand...

What defendants ? Obviously there was an issue. Who knows what it was ? To speculate that it was a "hardware level issue!" is as wrong as to say "It's beta software, of course it's going to have issues!".

Both camps are wrong. None of us know what actually happened, what part of the infrastructure went down to cause the outage and what the cause even was. It could be a software bug, it could be a hardware failure, it could be a network problem.
 
3goldens said:
Siri is just not ready for prime time, a complete waste of time, never works when you want it or simply gives you bad information, not to mention being a power and data drain, all of which Apple does not tell you in their beautiful advertisements on TV.

The Apple Jobs built is starting its decline, sad, but true!
Click to expand...

Siri is a BETA. I'll say it again a BETA, so Apple themselves labelled it as "not ready for prime time"

Siri isn't what drains the battery, it is the time zone location service.

Also Apple made similar/worse mistakes under Jobs with products that weren't labelled as Beta.

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miles01110 said:
No, it's not. Clearly it's not a software issue because it is so widespread. Clearly it is not a software issue because software does not randomly stop working after functioning for weeks. Clearly it is not a network problem. That leaves hardware, which makes sense because Apple still doesn't know how to run a cloud service.
Click to expand...

And you have their logs? How do you know that a coding error didn't cause something to hang? :rolleyes:

----------
tigres said:
Careful there miles, you are going to poison the kool aid for all these drinking defendants.
BTW your spot on, they can't run one now and Apple NEVER has been able to yet.
Click to expand...

Hmmm, I know a cloud service that Apple has run since 2003 very successfully. Think about it.
 
justinfreid said:
Further, Voice Commands seemed to do a really nice job building a local hash of songs and contact names to allow for playing a dialing songs...
Click to expand...
There is your mistake: asserting that Voice Command does a really good job. It doesn't. I have never used it for anything other than trying it out as it is far too error prone. Comparing VC to Siri is like Pong Vs the latest version of Halo.

Actually that is not even a valid comparison as what we are really comparing here is Voice Control Vs Nuance. Siri does not get involved till fed by Nuance's voice recognition results.

Initially I felt the 4S should auto-switch to VC if there was no Net access. But after trying it again, hoping it "somehow" got better, I found it was no better than last time I tried it. So even if there was an option to auto-switch to it, I probably would not use it. VC is even worse after you have used Siri.

That said I would like for some kind of localized access aside from VC.

Further, I have looked at the system requirements for Dragon Dictate:
"Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or OS X Lion
2GB of RAM recommended
3GB available hard drive space
Internet connection required for registration
Nuance-approved USB microphone (not included with download purchase)"

Seems to me we are only marginally within the realm of doing this locally, albeit with a hefty chunk of local storage and more RAM than any iOS device contains. Perhaps an option for those who want and are willing to sacrifice the space for it (if it can work at all on iOS--Nuance's own iOS products do not run locally on iOS)? A light version with greatly reduced vocabulary? I don't know, but surely we can get SOMETHING better than voice control when Siri is not accessible.




Michael
 
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