Siri Can Be An Expensive Assistant

Note: I am on jury duty this week.  Depending on if I am called or not, there may or may not be more posts for the rest of the week and into next week.

If you aren’t grandfathered into Verizon’s or AT&T’s unlimited data plans and you don’t have Sprint, you just might want to think twice before you ask your favorite iPhone assistant, Siri, to look something up or read that text for you.  According to several reports, iPhone 4S users use almost twice as much data as users of the iPhone 4.  The culprit it seems is Siri.  According to this Forbes article (and others), every time you ask Siri a question or tell Siri to do something it has to send your voice commands to Apple’s servers to understand what you are saying.  So even if you are asking it to play a song on your phone that is in your library, Siri has to go out to Apple’s servers to understand your command just to play that song. 

So as fun as Siri might be, you might want to limit your use depending your data plan and whether you are on wifi or not.

4 thoughts on “Siri Can Be An Expensive Assistant”

  1. In New York City, there are so many free wifi zones that I barely use 5% of my data plan each month. Most restaurants now have free wifi, and most of the city parks (except Central Park.)

  2. Thanks Tayster for the information. I think the better camera and cloud have a lot to do with it, but you can’t discount Siri’s data. It may not be a ton but as the arstechnica article stated you need to have to have the capacity to deal with that additional data.

    I think until recently people didn’t know that Siri had to talk with Apple servers to even understand what you were saying. I think most people understood that if you asked it a question that it need to look up on the Internet then that would require data. But I don’t think people knew if they were asking Siri to “call home” that it had to talk to Apple to know what number to call. Hell my Ford Flex can do that with my cell phone and it doesn’t need an Internet connection.

  3. Please see http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/iphone-4s-doubles-data-usage-but-is-siri-really-to-blame/17605
    http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars
    The tests show that Siri is not to blame. Perhaps it can be said that iPhone users are busy getting work done and actually use their devices. I agree that if you do not have an unlimited plan, it’s a good idea to gravitate towards a WiFi hotspot.

    -Tayster

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