With the launch of the iPhone 4S, Apple unveiled its latest invention onto the the iDevice known to all of us as SIRI. SIRI is a voice-command application that allows users to literally communicate with their phones as if they are talking to a person.
Though there are many apps for voice-commands on iOS & Android, there hasn’t been one which is as user-friendly and efficient as SIRI. Initial reviews of SIRI have been a mixed bag mainly due to the language problems it faces. SIRI can only understand particular accents including US & UK English making it a sort of useless feature for many International buyers.
Another big problem with SIRI that was assumed to be true until now was that SIRI uses a lot of internet data to function as it needs to connect to apple servers every time even for local operations on the phone like calendar, messaging etc. However folks at ArsTechnica have something else to say.
According to their testing, SIRI is not much of a data hogger. Here is the usage statistics:
- Setting up Appointments, Alarms, Reminders – 36.7 Kb / per task
- Connecting online to Google or Wolfram Alpha – 94 Kb / per task
- Dictation of short emails: 15 words – 36Kb / 40 words 109Kb
- For text messages, the average data required was 15 kb per text
A simple thumb rule would be that the longer the message the more data Siri would require to process the dictation request.
That would be quite a small amount of data used considering you use Siri approximately 15-20 times a day (roughly 250-300 MB/month). However, as for users in Asian countries where 3G is not that popular due to high data charges, Siri might function a bit slower than expected on EDGE or GPRS. We have heard people comment that it requires minimum a 3G plan of WiFi and might not work at all on EDGE / 2G networks. We would of course come back with more once we get a hands-on!