Siri gets over her huff, returns useful as ever

Apple's vocal mistress Siri had a brief time-out yesterday when the cloud-based service dispersed, leaving iPhone users to prod their screens like everyone else. It's not clear what went wrong. Apple is being as fulsome as ever, but for a good few hours Americans were greeted with a connection error when asking Siri a question …

[Anonymous Coward]

I pretty much don't care.

[Ian Davies]

Irony much?

Do I need to explain the enormous comedy value in the first post being from someone anonymously declaring that they don't care?

[Ilgaz]

Remember Ericsson T28?

I think what happened is exactly like Ericsson T28 with first of kind cover. People liked to play with it, show (off) their friends and it ended up at service centers because their engineers never imagined it will be used that much.

[ZillaOfManilla]

I remember

you could get into a menu to see how many times it had opened. Or was that on the Samsung?

[Ilgaz]

They added to firmware I guess

As they got nuts about failure rate and t28 owners were the last ones they want to piss off, they may have added something to service menu. It is like laptop producers putting liquid detector chips since they got tired of dried laptop owners demanding warranty cover.

The basic calculation was number of calls and very rarely used sms message composing of that time. They had to multiply with 10 or 20.

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked Siri

Where can I hide a body?

Interesting answer.....

[stucs201]

GlaDOS > Siri

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz7WEk5u_bE

[LarsG]

AS USEFUL AS.......

Herpes.

As with all gimmicky technology it only appeals to the person who is showing off.

Until it can hold a conversation, to me it is as useful as on open ended condom.

[Ivan Headache]

You could ask it

how to put on a closed end condom.

She would probably laugh.

[Ilgaz]

Will you get impressed that easy?

First of all there are amazingly clever irc bots. Secondly I remember holding a conversation with my Amiga. It was something starting with R and came on single diskette. 22 years ago or more. People keeps getting impressed with same things. Of course context aware search is big deal but asking lame questions and getting amused by not so good jokes is really weird.

[Phil 54]

Eliza

on a Commodore PET

[Steve Evans]

As also recently demonstrated by Blackberry, this is exactly why you should think very carefully before having functions and features offloaded into the ether. You never know what is at the other end doing the hard work, it could have (and both BBM and Siri seem to have) several single points of failure.

[Ilgaz]

They asked for it. It will never scale.

Being a certified UNIX vendor (big deal to get it) they abandoned their servers and enterprise customers and bought windows cloud servers. If any other company was at their position where a device is at Fortune 500 meeting rooms, they would take the advantage and promote their servers not giving up standards of course. Just watch how ms will use the windows brand for those archaic and incapable handsets.

[RosieRedfield]

For me, Siri is a useful resource, not just a novelty, because her voice recognition is more accurate than my typing.

[Mike 29]

The point. You are missing it.

[Mips]

What do you mean her...

.. all I can get on the line is some bloke, and he does not sound all that sympathetic !

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think..

If I ask Siri where to hide a body and do so that Apple will be joint defendants as accessories after the fact?