Beware a man who buys pixels in barrels - Bill Jackson
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Siri on Iphone 4S falls short in the UK
THE INQUIRER has got its hands on an Iphone 4S and discovered that its Siri voice control software can't search local businesses in the UK.
Siri, your personal Iphone assistant, can't tell you where the nearest restaurant is or guide you to local attractions in the UK. The software is one of the big selling points for the Iphone 4S, which went on sale earlier today.
We've contacted Apple about the issue but have yet to hear anything back.
We loaded Siri on the Iphone 4S and asked it where to find the nearest cinema. Much to our surprise, it calmly told us that it was unable to deal with the request. This means the software falls short of what we expected from it and that it's back to good old Google for the answer.
The feature works fine in the US, where Apple has teamed up with Yell to provide the location data needed. We hope, for its own sake, the fruit themed firm can find a UK partner and get the Siri location service up and running.
We'll give you an update as soon as we hear back from Apple. In the meantime take a look at our hands-on with the shiny Iphone 4S. µ
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siri has a standard that when it can't figure something out it asks if it should list the webresults.
So the question is does it actually really not have location data, in which case that would fail too, or is it simply that it doesn't have an internal directory lookup service for the UK yet.
Either way I find it pretty creepy how your voice is sent to the apple server, where it's no doubt being analyzed and identified and stored with your name for future use, and then given a unique ID which is stored with all your search requests, forever, and of course relayed to the US gov. NSA servers too, regardless in what part of the world you are.
But sorry for mentioning that early, this is suppose to be a big surprise discovery in another 3 years at which point apple will come with all sorts of insane BS excuses and denials.
That this was the only fault you could find with the world best smartphone ;)
I will refer you to the Apple Keynote speech (4th October), the Apple website and every other source of official info regarding Siri. It is BETA software and will be update over the coming weeks/months.
American company in failure to take rest of planet into consideration shocker!
This is very, very poor indeed. Just taken mine out of its box and what do you know... it completely fails to live up to any of the Siri hype.
Very unimpressed.
The irony is that voice search does work on Windows Phone 7 Mango!
I said "find local restaurants" and my phone opened up the Local Scount Bing engine and showed me the local restaurants! From there I can get the navigation directions, phone number, customer reviews, and any 3rd party apps specific to my search.
I was pleasantly surprised. :)