The real costs of the new Prima Donna: Siri

[SeaKing]

The real costs of the new Prima Donna: Siri

A short definition: Prima Donna - "a vain or undisciplined person who finds it difficult to work under direction or as part of a team ..."

"How Siri is ruining your cellphone service"
By Paul Farhi, Published: January 26. 2012
Washington Post

"... Most ways you look at it, Siri is pretty magical.
But not in every way. Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1"

"...Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported."

"In all, Arieso says that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S “appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...y.html?hpid=z2

Data costs the user money. Too much data usage degrades the networks, drops calls, slows everyone down whether you are using Siri or not.

There are three questions in my mind.
1. Will Siri survive using as much data as it does?
2. Will we survive Siri?

3. (Did someone mention "Skynet?")

[John F]

I have my doubts (about Siri being a Guzzler). I'm guessing it uses much let bandwidth then Netflix, Pandora, iTunes cloud music, ...

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by John F

I have my doubts (about Siri being a Guzzler). I'm guessing it uses much less bandwidth then Netflix, Pandora, iTunes cloud music, ...

I think on a per second scale, Siri is probably on par with Pandora or iTunes. Can't really compare to Netflix and other relatively high bitrate streaming video services, though.

[Penforhire]

Data providers are making money hand-over-fist on data rates! They are chuckling with glee over Siri's data consumption. And as noted by John, an hour of Netflix uses more data than months of questions to Siri. We consumers are chafing at the cost to us, individually. This inequity will level out. Viva la data revolution!

[RainingLemur]

Originally Posted by SeaKing

3. (Did someone mention "Skynet?")

Be careful what you wish for.

[BeccaPrice]

Has Siri been upgraded to where it will answer questions about problem pregnancy centers, birth control, and things like that? or is it still misogynistic?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Data providers are making money hand-over-fist on data rates! They are chuckling with glee over Siri's data consumption. And as noted by John, an hour of Netflix uses more data than months of questions to Siri. We consumers are chafing at the cost to us, individually. This inequity will level out. Viva la data revolution!

I get a data allowance of 1GB/month on my iPhone - that's the lowest that my provider offers. I use my iPhone all day, every day, but I don't think I've ever used more than about 250MB in a month. Mind you, I don't watch video.

[Penforhire]

Nor do you listen to a lot of streaming music (e.g. Pandora, which sucks down a goodly chunk of data). And you don't deal with too many unnecessarily large PowerPoint presentations e-mailed to you like I do, lol. GPS data is one of my biggest regular 3G data consumptions. I notice it is 300-500 KB whenever I fire up the Maps app and look for something nearby (not having paid for an off-line app with its own map database). And what about iCloud activity like backups (currently OS-restricted to wifi but someday...)?

[elemenoP]

If you make a request to Siri that doesn't require any web lookup--for example "remind me to pick up the milk--does Siri's service still call on an Apple server somewhere and use data minutes?

I found this analysis of other factors that could be at play in iPhone 4S users' increased data usage:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/i...to-blame/17605

eP

[Dulin's Books]

and its deliberate. Carriers are watching their profit margins shrink because of the high subsidy for the iPhone and how popular it is. Apple created Siri to use more bandwidth to increase the carriers cash flow.

my understanding is that every instance of talking at Siri requires it to check in with the servers as part of the speech recognition process

[emellaich]

Originally Posted by elemenoP

If you make a request to Siri that doesn't require any web lookup--for example "remind me to pick up the milk--does Siri's service still call on an Apple server somewhere and use data minutes?

Yes it does. The actual recognition happens on Apple's servers.

[Kali Yuga]

Increased bandwidth use strains the existing data networks. The carriers may charge more for it, but they will also need to dramatically step up their data infrastructure, which will cost them billions.

I'm reasonably confident that Apple did not collaborate with any of the carriers prior to implementing data-hogging services, and certainly would not have created a data hog at the request of the carriers. Someone said "this is a neat idea" and ran with it to get a competitive edge.

[teh603]

What the heck is Siri, anyway? This is the first I've heard of it.

[SeaKing]

Originally Posted by teh603

What the heck is Siri, anyway? This is the first I've heard of it.

Ahh my child. Welcome to the new Universe not at all far away.

Added- (I have more time than I thought.)

Siri is a kind of Artificial Intelligence. You can ask "your iPhone" a question and it will give you an answer. Apple bought a company, named Siri I think, that was heavily involved in this kind of technology, and implemented it into the latest iPhone.
Before that you could give relatively simple commands to phones or to GPS systems and get certain actions. With Siri you get a much better sense of someone being on the "end of the line" responding to your comments or questions. Almost like a real live person.
The thing is though the phone doesn't have the computing power and memory to do this kind of thing by itself, so the questions go to Apple servers and then come back to your phone. Takes a lot of bandwidth.

Other examples are HTC will allow you to speak and convert your words into a text message, and vice-versa. There are many examples, but Siri is probably more advanced than any other consumer product. I give Apple credit. They brought out something that fascinates their users, AGAIN. Again they will make a lot of money.

I don't spend that kind of money on my phone, and probably you don't either, so that is why the subject hasn't crossed your horizon.

[Dulin's Books]

yes the service itself was already available as an app called Siri.

Whats funny to me is that all the tech writers who wrote about the iphone 4s launch reported how Siri works and mentioned that it does the voice recognition at the servers and yet all of them now write about the data usage as if they had never heard how it works.