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Some iPhone owners who have the iOS 18.1 beta installed appear to be experiencing issues with the Siri personal assistant, which has stopped working sometime over the course of the last couple of days.

siri-broken-ios-18-1-beta.jpg

There are multiple reports from people experiencing issues on social media, as noted by 9to5Mac, as well as complaints on Reddit and the MacRumors forums. Impacted users are seeing a "Siri Not Available" banner when attempting to use Siri.

The banner says that "Data for Siri is downloading" or that users need to "Connect to Wi-Fi to complete Siri download." Either way, no download completes as it seems to get stuck at 99 percent, and Siri remains unavailable.

Not all users who are running iOS 18.1 are impacted, and restarting does not fix the problem. Turning off Apple Intelligence allows the old version of Siri to work, but toggling it off and on again also does not address the issue.

It is not clear what happened with Siri, but it is worth noting that iOS 18.1 is a beta and there are often bugs in betas, which is why caution should be used when installing beta software. Apple will likely push out a fix for the problem in the near future.

For now, if you need Siri access and are running iOS 18.1, temporarily turn off Apple Intelligence.

Article Link: Siri Not Working for Some iOS 18.1 Beta Users
The fix for this is to turn off "Talk to Siri" and turn it back on again. You will need repeat the Hey Siri prompts as per setup but Siri on Apple Intelligence will start working again.

I was getting a "Siri Unavailable. You are not connected to the internet" prompt even though I was - turning "talk to Siri" off and on immediately fixed it.
 
Darn. I was hoping 18.1 with Siri intelligence was going to be ready for Siri’s birthday on 4 October. Looks like she will still be in beta. Nothing was done on her 10th birthday, and she was treated like a stepchild that Apple didn’t even mention that it was her birthday. Poor baby.
 
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The fix for this is to turn off "Talk to Siri" and turn it back on again. You will need repeat the Hey Siri prompts as per setup but Siri on Apple Intelligence will start working again.

I was getting a "Siri Unavailable. You are not connected to the internet" prompt even though I was - turning "talk to Siri" off and on immediately fixed it.
That did not work for me Siri stuff still broken in apple intelligence mode
 
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First Impressions. Going to be terrible when first-time iPhone owners get their iPhone 16 and can't even use a 10 year old feature.

Beta.

The whole *point* of beta testing is to identify issues like this. Anyone complaining about issues — while wilfully choosing to install beta software — doesn't understand what beta means.

In a beta release, app logs and crash logs are sent back to Apple for analysis in identifying such issues happening "in the wild".

The final release of iOS 18 for iPhone 16 will be stable.
 
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Beta.

The whole *point* of beta testing is to identify issues like this. Anyone complaining about issues — while wilfully choosing to install beta software — doesn't understand what beta means.

In a beta release, app logs and crash logs are sent back to Apple for analysis in identifying such issues happening "in the wild".

The final release of iOS 18 for iPhone 16 will be stable.
Truth and I file the bug reports that is what it is all about.
 
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Nothing new.
Siri has had issues for the past 10 years.

Often, other factors, not Siri itself, have contributed to the poorer experience. People just blame the problems on Siri.
  • Weak network connection.
  • Poorly-pronounced wording.
  • Loosely-chosen wording.
  • Too much background noise.
  • Unreasonable expectations for a prompt-driven tool.
Often, Amazon Alexa or Google's variant will implement a "skill" that Siri doesn't yet support, and as a result people will claim that "Siri is broken" when trying to do the same thing. It's unreasonable to expect these tools to all be perfectly equal in every respect.

Siri is going to be dramatically better going forward. But she's been great in so many ways. That can't be denied.
 
Honestly, this sounds more like a server-side issues rather than client- (device-) side. The download is stuck at 99%. It is entirely possible that this could be fixed server-side.
my guess is they pushed the update earlier and it needs the next Beta to install fully. What's random is that it only happens when you actually go into AI Settings.
 
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Beta.

The whole *point* of beta testing is to identify issues like this. Anyone complaining about issues — while wilfully choosing to install beta software — doesn't understand what beta means.

In a beta release, app logs and crash logs are sent back to Apple for analysis in identifying such issues happening "in the wild".

The final release of iOS 18 for iPhone 16 will be stable.
The iPhone 16 is being released in 2 weeks. That's cutting it close, now we know why apple designed the method to update boxed iPhones.
 
As others said, a lot of people experienced this with 18.1 beta 1 and a restart fixed the issue.
 
The iPhone 16 is being released in 2 weeks. That's cutting it close, now we know why apple designed the method to update boxed iPhones.

Just remember this is for 18.1, not 18.0. So 18.1 is likely in 6-8 weeks and they could easily delay it if needed, but I haven't seen the issue myself and I've been on the 18.1 dev beta since the first release on my 15 PM.
 
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