Right after the iPhone 4S launched, Siri was painfully slow, which we expected. After all, everyone walking out of an Apple store with the new phone was obviously trying to get Siri to play nice. The more people that began asking Siri questions, the longer it would take for Siri to find an answer. Clearly people were taxing the server, but just how much information was being sent to the Siri servers for every request? According to Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Tecnica, not a whole lot. Asking Siri questions on your iPhone requires, on average, 63KB per query.
Cheng’s findings:
“If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.”
Personally, I only use Siri once or twice per day or every other day. The technology is great, but the more I use it, the more I struggle with getting it to do the things that I want it to do. Maybe it’s my Canadian accent, but Siri seems to misunderstand me from time to time. I find myself wondering if opening up my contacts and picking a phone number is quicker.
Don’t get me wrong, Siri is likely a major part of the future, and it’s currently a “beta” product, so things are only going to start looking up from here. While the average person may only use kilobytes of data today, down the road those numbers could easily increase drastically as Siri gets tighter integrations with iOS.
