iPhone 4S and Siri popularity crashes Apple Siri servers
4 November 2011 by Olav Hellesø-Knutsen One of the most hyped improvements in the new iPhone 4S was the Siri voice assistant service. The service requires a connection to Apple servers to work. Yesterday the Siri servers went down because of high load
During the Apple Event on October 4th, Apple spent most of the iPhone 4S time (21 out of 36 minutes) talking about the great Siri feature. How this could improve human to computer interaction via voice commands. We just wanted to mention this just to highlight what Apple think is of importance with the new iOS 5 and iPhone 4S. The demonstration of Siri happened exactly 10 days before the iPhone 4S was available in stores, and what Apple showed the audience back then was a Siri service still running in Beta. The Siri system was not ready for launch.
This is the second fault with iPhone 4S during this week. We had the battery drain issue yesterday and now the unavailable Siri. The battery issue was solved with an iOS update which will be released soon. Because not everyone had problems with this random bug, Apple could not communicate much around the issue before they were 100% sure that this was a iOS problem and not any third-party app. This is not a fault requiring immediate solution, and such software bugs will be found in future releases as well. It is nothing to being heated about. Siri being unavailable is another story. Apple must have known that one of their major online services was out of order. Failing to inform their customers about this and the expected time before it will be back online is ignorant from a large company. Apart from the now deceased Steve Jobs, no-one at Apple is allowed to communicate anything about Apple products. The products should talk for them self. Any they are, according to Apple, amazing, revolutionary and impressive. No need for human invention in the communication between Apple products and the consumers. Apple is one of the biggest tech companies now, so the strategy surely works and most of the time that is OK. But when things don't work as expected, someone over at Apple must get down from the high horse and actually talk to their customers. Apple has clearly something to learn from the other mobile phone manufactures. For example: LG, Nokia, Samsung Mobile, Sony Ericsson, HTC all have blogs, global and local Facebook and Twitter accounts where issues like the Siri outage would have been mentioned. Alternatively post this in the Esato forum Please sign in to your Esato account to leave a comment regarding this article  masseur12 years, 5 months agoSiri is still in Beta. This has been made clear from the start and they are constantly improving it which is why the system cannot yet find businesses etc outside US yet.
See the official Siri page here where it clearly says "Beta" 
Something that's in Beta is being asked too much of it & obviously over loading. Perhaps they should have not released it until it was fully ready. Or would that have affected the 4s sales if Siri was not on the 4s??
Nevertheless. It's the first time I have seen a Beta release from Apple. Google on the other hand is famous for releasing beta services. Gmail was running in Beta for over 5 years. You still expect these services to be available even though it's a Beta service don't you?
Releasing Siri as a Beta services is not typical Apple. They tend to have everything polished and thoroughly tested before being released to the public. Maybe things are changing so fast these days that it is little time left for testing? I'm sure some people bought the 4S partly due to Siri.
I love it and it works almost flawlessly and I use it many times a day, though perhaps not so much in public! @bono, I read an article recently which had made up a poll of questions asked to fans waiting outside London's flagship Apple store, and the majority of people were looking most forward to siri over the A5 chip and 8MP camera. I think it was an extremely important part of the 4S and one Apple pushed quite a lot (as the article says above, 21 out of 36 minutes talking about it). They probably knew they needed something else other then a better camera and dual core, if they wanted people to upgrade to the 4S and not stick with the 4 (or upgrade to the 4).
But everyone knows how good Apple are at shouting and exaggerating the uniqueness and originality of their products (Facetime is a good example) Plus it's racist 
Siri is beta, and beta in the true sense of the word, not the google definition (gmail in "beta" for five years and many millions of users is a nonsense by google, nothing more). Beta software by definition *cannot* and should not be relied on, it's there for testing and demonstration, that's all. It will have bugs and it will, in the case of a cloud service like this, fall over once in a while - if they could guarantee it won't it wouldn't be beta, would it?
Och,if you try & say in a Scottish accent like Taggart it's murder it won't understand it  I like that he says 12 O'clock & it answers what is treblecocck [ This Message was edited by: Bonovox on 2011-11-04 19:33 ] Users of beta software are by definition called beta testers. Is that what iPhone 4S owners are? I do not think everyone who bought the 4S know that Siri is a beta feature. The difference between Gmail beta and Siri beta is the price you are paying for them. Gmail is "free" while the cost of Siri is built into the retail price. Does Siri use much internet data though?? [ This Message was edited by: Bonovox on 2011-11-04 19:49 ] Laffen, you obviously missed it, but Apple have been quite clear and upfront about Siri's beta nature. Users of Siri are in effect beta testers, yes. It is of course just one beta feature within the otherwise finished and polished product they've purchased (the iPhone itself).
what ? siri is in Beta stage? Hmm... I've never thought a technology that is already established and used by others 6-7 years ago is still in Beta stage for Apple. thats because they have such huge plans for this but they wanted to give everyone the basic functionality now while making it clear by calling it beta that it is a living breathing product that will grow and change over time.
I enjoyed that demonstration but why would you say it is racist? I would have thrown the phone against the wall if I were that man, that was absolutely frustrating. I am imagining a Jamaican trying to use that facility
It needs quite a bit of work. still... going back to the subject of the topic, its good to see that Siri is getting alot of use, and anyway, many high profile services that are not even in beta and are well established have outages so I really fail to see what this was much of a story  (other than it being an Apple story, of course)
to me, I don't see any revolution in Siri. It is still the same voice recognition application that has been developed and used long time ago. Microsoft Voice Commander is one of the voice recognition application that I've been using since X1 time and it is very good. It integrate with most of the phone functionality, it helps during car driving, good or pretty accurate recognition algorithm... and all these have been done 6 years ago.
Now, with Siri its the same again. I was hoping Apple to come out a new technology or architecture that can improve voice recognition and not only based on software alone. To this date, all voice recognition device are facing the same problem which is unusable in the noisy environment. You need near quite environment for the system to recognize, if not you will ended repeat the same task again and again which defeat the purpose. I thought in the beginning, Apple will come out with new hardware which combine several components such as proximity sensor, camera (for lips detection) and microphone for the voice recognition. Apparently, it is still the same voice recognition software that has been used since the era of creative labs sound blaster product which is more than 10 years ago. It's probably a matter of opinion exactly how revolutionary it is but the difference between Siri and something like Voice Command is pretty obvious. Apple already had an equivalent to that in the form of Voice Control, which has been built in to the iPhone since the 3GS (it's also available on the 4S if you choose to disable Siri).
What's special about Siri is the way that voice recognition is couple with some artificial intelligence (on the server end) which allows you to have a natural conversation with the device. Instead of being limited to pre-programmed phrases like "call so and so" or "play this", Siri's recognition and understanding of questions and commands is potentially limitless - which means of course that it can be used for much more than the standard things you might do with a phone - it's more than just a shortcut to certain apps or different way to press buttons, it's an assistant that can help you with almost anything. That's the promise of it anyway - it is of course still in beta, and very early days. Maybe it'll be remembered only as a gimmick, or maybe it is the next "big thing" that everyone will scramble to copy off Apple - time will tell. But to compare it to Voice Command? That's the same limited thinking that dismissed the original iPhone, because phones with touchscreens had been around way back... Of course they had, but that didn't mean Apple's wasn't different, or indeed revolutionary. I feel, as in wrestling, I should somehow do a "tag" to continue on from Boinng (  ) but yes, Siri is so much more than simple command recognition. Several times Siri has not fully understood me and yet when I continue on "she" (female Aussie) has continued within the same context to regain understanding of what I was on about and correctly action my request.She does that to me Masseur
I've got the Aussie one set the posh Guy is annoying lol Btw Siri is good for texting, setting up stuff on ur iPhone as well as look up stuff online and find out what Time it is in other countries It's just ATM it cannot locate a pizza place To order a pizza hah |
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