Siri's Impact on Data Usage Examined

[Rodimus Prime]

Depends on what's being sent to the Apple servers, I guess. If it's the audio information, at 8 to 32kb/sec encoding (a quick Google search suggests that's typical for voice-only) then your four-second sentence is 4 to 16 kbytes. Add various overheads, including encryption I assume, and it makes sense if it's audio being sent. No idea if that's what's really going, but food for thought...

Try it can and will be a lot lower that even 32kb/s because the 32kb is for when a human is listening on the other end and you do not want to lose that quality for listening. Since Siri is not going to car about that it should degrade it even lower. It only needs to be good enough for a computer to translate it which means you need even less bandwidth so I could see it being cut way down to below 8kb/s

 

[Commodore 64]

Ok, I haven´t bought the 4s yet. But I find Siri very interesting (anything more accurate than Voice Control is). And I couldn´t care less about data usage. Yet...

I believe Siri will get REALLY usefull and adopted by most users when Apple open up for 3rd party apps. And let Siri access everything on the phone, settings, opening apps, turning the screen vertically/horisontically, everything.

As for now, it actually is presented as a beta. Which means it´s limited, right? But I already see a lot of situations were I would find it useful. Like driving obviously. And something nobody mentioned yet is bicycling (ok, same category as jogging). And I don´t like pulling out my phone when it´s raining or cold outside (but I´m using my headset). Or generally for getting info or doing anything with the phone while walking, and you don´t want to run into things (ok, maybe we´re too busy when we have to do both). And the list goes on.

But hey, think about how it´ll be when driving, you´ll be able to ask Siri to read out the text message that just came in, have her open your GPS-app, have Siri enter the destination you got in the message and start the route, let Siri check the status on that item you were considering on the eBay app, have her check your account, and then maybe even buy that item from eBay

Ok, this is future stuff. But in perspective, I don´t see the need of worrying about data usage until then

By the way, how many are using FaceTime? They never called it beta, but as I remember, Steve clearly said it was limited (only running on WiFi). And I thought it was a genious move, letting us play with it and get accustomed with it before we would start worrying about data usage. Same now with Siri. Why would they release a key feature in beta? Just because the didn´t get to finish the programming, or because they just needed a key feature? No, I believe they want us to get into the habit of using it, before they open it fully, which would demand more from the network providers, and eat more into our data plans.

I just wonder if they´ll need one more generation of iPhone (with LTE) to fully open FaceTime (don´t see that coming until on LTE/4G) and Siri, or if it could just be done with an update.

 

[goosnarrggh]

Try it can and will be a lot lower that even 32kb/s because the 32kb is for when a human is listening on the other end and you do not want to lose that quality for listening. Since Siri is not going to car about that it should degrade it even lower. It only needs to be good enough for a computer to translate it which means you need even less bandwidth so I could see it being cut way down to below 8kb/s

The original GSM standard included an audio codec allowing voice calls to be conducted legibly (not perfect, but passable) at as low as 5.6kbit/s. It's not unreasonable to think that similar (or even better) bitrates could be achieved using more modern compression techniques for Siri's purposes.

 

[smali]

Who in their right mind gets a data-capped contract with a smartphone these days?

 

[goosnarrggh]

Who in their right mind gets a data-capped contract with a smartphone these days?

100% of all new customers who choose to sign up with AT&T or Verizon...
Or anybody who buys or already owns any smartphone with any provider anywhere in Canada...

 

[Tinmania]

The original GSM standard included an audio codec allowing voice calls to be conducted legibly (not perfect, but passable) at as low as 5.6kbit/s. It's not unreasonable to think that similar (or even better) bitrates could be achieved using more modern compression techniques for Siri's purposes.

I am somewhat puzzled by the implied sentiment that real-time voice recognition is so good that a computer can do it better than a human. I would think the opposite: Passable for a human being will generally not be passable for a computer, at least not in real time.

Based on the data usage measured for simple queries, which would appear to not need much data returned, I would venture it is recording the audio somewhere between 24-32kbps which seems like a decent compromise between quality and data usage (ergo, speed).

Even at EDGE speeds a 4 second query could be sent to the cloud in roughly a second.



Michael

 

[Sackvillenb]

Well that's neat. Pretty interesting to see the numbers associated with these inquiries.