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Does Siri reach out to Apple's servers to execute a command?

iFanaddic

iFanaddic

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 24, 2008
819
242
Montréal, Canada
Does siri use my internet connection when I'm asking it to set a timer, change songs, write a message to... ect.

I would assume siri only uses my data plan when I'm asking it to lookup stuff online and that commands can be done "on its own" right?
 
Really hope this changes when it comes out of beta.

Driving home from work yesterday...
Me: "Play songs by xxx"
Siri: "I'm sorry, I can't seem to connect to the network"

It's ludicrous! Why does it need to connect to the network for tasks like that?!
:mad:
 
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

Siri connects to the web because, among other things, it allows the Siri team to see the requests coming through and continually adjust the way that Siri interprets the requests. Apple replaced the old Voice Control (which has the syntactical commands like 'Play song by <artist>") which didn't need network but it was really spotty in understanding you. You lose an occasionally working feature for something that works well, and, over time, gets better.
 
sammich said:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

Siri connects to the web because, among other things, it allows the Siri team to see the requests coming through and continually adjust the way that Siri interprets the requests. Apple replaced the old Voice Control (which has the syntactical commands like 'Play song by <artist>") which didn't need network but it was really spotty in understanding you. You lose an occasionally working feature for something that works well, and, over time, gets better.
Click to expand...

I dunno, I think Apple should let Voice Control work when you have no access to their Siri Server. At the end of the day, if I request to play songs by an artist, I would expect it to (as it did with my 3GS with Voice Control).
 
FSMBP said:
I dunno, I think Apple should let Voice Control work when you have no access to their Siri Server. At the end of the day, if I request to play songs by an artist, I would expect it to (as it did with my 3GS with Voice Control).
Click to expand...

That's something that's very much against Apple's approach for consistency. If it started out as Siri, who can understand natural language, but then all of a sudden you had to contend with the plain Voice Control because of no network, it wouldn't understand because it requires commands to be spoken to a strict syntax. You wouldn't be familiar with this syntax because Siri has taught you otherwise. You'd probably end up more frustrated than before.
 
I see both the users' and Apple's point of view on this. Both sides have valid arguments but it seems to me like there is a simple compromise available that would meet everyone's needs. If the the reason it wants a data connection even for tasks that don't require Siri to look beyond what's already on the phone is so they can track questions and answers I don't see why Siri couldn't cache these results and dump them to Apple once the phone has a connection.
 
sammich said:
Siri connects to the web because, among other things, it allows the Siri team to see the requests coming through and continually adjust the way that Siri interprets the requests. Apple replaced the old Voice Control (which has the syntactical commands like 'Play song by <artist>") which didn't need network but it was really spotty in understanding you. You lose an occasionally working feature for something that works well, and, over time, gets better.
Click to expand...

Totally agree with what you're saying here but I'm guessing Apple find it hard to see what you're requesting when there's no signal ;)
 
Vizin said:
I believe the voice processing technology relies on a large database of voice samples to do speech-to-text processing.

The phone is powerful enough to interpret a limited set of commands, "Listen to", "Call", etc, and then match what you say next with your music and contacts database. But to transcribe completely arbitrary text that it can't match with any known phrases requires a server. Android is the same way.

The real question is, why doesn't it fall back to local voice control when it doesn't have a connection? The 3GS and 4 have that feature so I can't imagine it would take much work to implement.
Click to expand...
Voice control is there on the 4s just turn Siri off and it appears.
 
The problem as I see it, with the entire "computing in the cloud strategy" is that no matter what company implements it, or provides the service, we are subject to our internet connection being always on and functional. The moment we are "offline" we are left with only what is resident on our devices.

It's for this very reason I have built a very comprehensive and robust home network. NAS for backup, and fiber for data flow. But in fairness this was very expensive and done when the house was being built last year. I have a vast amount of fiber, with wireline for backup / redundancy in virtually every wall in the house. Something like this is not possible, practically speaking, in an existing home.
 
vitzr said:
The problem as I see it, with the entire "computing in the cloud strategy" is that no matter what company implements it, or provides the service, we are subject to our internet connection being always on and functional. The moment we are "offline" we are left with only what is resident on our devices.

It's for this very reason I have built a very comprehensive and robust home network. NAS for backup, and fiber for data flow. But in fairness this was very expensive and done when the house was being built last year. I have a vast amount of fiber, with wireline for backup / redundancy in virtually every wall in the house. Something like this is not possible, practically speaking, in an existing home.
Click to expand...


don't see the relevance to this thread....just a boasting opportunity
 
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)

vitzr said:
The problem as I see it, with the entire "computing in the cloud strategy" is that no matter what company implements it, or provides the service, we are subject to our internet connection being always on and functional. The moment we are "offline" we are left with only what is resident on our devices.

It's for this very reason I have built a very comprehensive and robust home network. NAS for backup, and fiber for data flow. But in fairness this was very expensive and done when the house was being built last year. I have a vast amount of fiber, with wireline for backup / redundancy in virtually every wall in the house. Something like this is not possible, practically speaking, in an existing home.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing.
 
I do think there should be a seamless way of moving between Siri and the native voice command system. Something like this:

Me: Siri, call my wife at work.
Siri: I am having trouble connecting to the network. Would you like to try your request on voice command?
Me: Yes.
iPhone: Beep beep.
Me: Call Jane Doe -- work.
iPhone: Calling Jane Doe -- work.
 
sammich said:
That's something that's very much against Apple's approach for consistency. If it started out as Siri, who can understand natural language, but then all of a sudden you had to contend with the plain Voice Control because of no network, it wouldn't understand because it requires commands to be spoken to a strict syntax. You wouldn't be familiar with this syntax because Siri has taught you otherwise. You'd probably end up more frustrated than before.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your sharing. It reads quite interesting and seems to make sense.:)
 
thelatinist said:
I do think there should be a seamless way of moving between Siri and the native voice command system. Something like this:

Me: Siri, call my wife at work.
Siri: I am having trouble connecting to the network. Would you like to try your request on voice command?
Me: Yes.
iPhone: Beep beep.
Me: Call Jane Doe -- work.
iPhone: Calling Jane Doe -- work.
Click to expand...

Yes, there definitely needs to be a "little siri" in the phone as a backup.
 
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