ios 13 Siri slow to respond and problems creating reminders

Great news...I have found a solution. The bad news is that I think it’s unnecessary. I said earlier that I am a very heavy user of reminders. I have about 35 lists between two different iCloud accounts (my personal account and one shared with my wife) and in total have about 25,000 completed tasks (reminders) that we’re in those various lists.

My “main“ list is just called “Reminders” and I believe that’s the default list that Apple set up so many years ago. Long story short, that particular list had about 18,000 completed tasks/reminders in it. On a hunch, I took all of my active tasks (yet to be completed) and moved them to a separate list and then deleted that entire list. It took several minutes to do that. I then set up a new list also called reminders and went into settings —> reminders on iOS and changed my default list back to the new “Reminders” list that I just made.

I made this change a few hours ago and since then I’ve made about 10 time based reminders through Siri and have not had a single failure.

My Plan going forward is to take the rest of my more heavily used lists and delete them and then reset them up as a new list.

hopefully this helps everyone else who has this problem. (Essentially you are deleting all of the completed tasks since there’s no way to do that other than individually removing them one by one which is not really sustainable with 18,000-25,000 completed tasks.)

Apple - if you’re listening, please reach out to me and tell me if there’s any way that I can accomplish the same thing without deleting these lists and setting them up as new again. Again I have about 35 different lists and it’s going to take a while to move items from one list to another one, delete the old list, set up a new list, and then move those reminders back. Thank you!

I took all of my active tasks (yet to be completed) and moved them to a separate list and then deleted that entire list. It took several minutes to do that. I then set up a new list also called reminders and went into settings —> reminders on iOS and changed my default list back to the new “Reminders” list that I just made.

Thanks! I just verified that this solves the problem. A large number of completed reminders on the default list makes Siri slow.

Thank you for posting this Frank! On my default list I had a very large amount of reminders as well. It’s silly that past, completed reminders don’t seem to ever go away or if they do they’re kept for a very long time. Deleting the monster list and creating a fresh version definitely sped things up.

PS oops. Hit reply on the wrong post.

This initially worked, but a few days later, Siri is back to "just a moment..." before each reminder. Very frustrating.

ajcannon wrote:

On a hunch, I took all of my active tasks (yet to be completed) and moved them to a separate list and then deleted that entire list. It took several minutes to do that. I then set up a new list also called reminders and went into settings —> reminders on iOS and changed my default list back to the new “Reminders” list that I just made.

I made this change a few hours ago and since then I’ve made about 10 time based reminders through Siri and have not had a single failure.

Great find. Not sure if it will last, but moving all my completed reminders to another folder fixed my very long running Siri slowness issues (at least temporarily). Thank you!

Yes...this has been an exercise in futility. It works for a day and then it doesn't. So frustrating. I finally spent a few hours yesterday and completely set up all 31 of my lists again, from scratch, on a brand new iCloud account that I created solely for this purpose. So now I have two iCloud accounts on my iPhone and Mac. Cool, Apple! It just works, doesn't it?

I wouldn't be so frustrated if it had never worked to begin with. But to offer this and then make a change that makes it useless/ineffective is just so infuriating.

Anyways, my solution now of the new iCloud account IS working...but it's only been about 30 hours, so the verdict is still out.

Update your iPhone to iOS 13.2

I see the same behavior on Iphone 11 Pro / Apple Watch Serie 5 . Most of the time it fails, while asking for homekit scene.

Was working perfectly with IOS 12, and I thnik better while my phone / watch were on 13 / 6 but my apple Tv still on 12.4 .

I have the same problem. If I use siri frequently, every response after the first is quick, but the first question Siri always says "just a sec..." then waits 10 seconds to do what I asked her (usually setting reminders). Siri worked fine on IOS 12, but I get this delay on 13 and 13.1 now. Makes siri mostly useless.

Same happening to my iPhone Xs.

Using Siri is now frustrating due to the long response time.

Hope to find solutions

Yes, agreed. Brand new iPhone 11Pro with the latest iOS.

Siri had gradually improved over the past two years and has now taken several steps backward in comprehension and responsiveness — a big disappointment. Software quality control must improve.

I’m having the same problem and it is so frustrating. I am a very heavy user of time based reminders and they are consistently failing now with iOS 13 (just upgraded to iOS 13.2 today and they are still failing.)

I can set them manually but if I try to use Siri to set them they will fail every single time.

Same problem, really slow since iOS13, updates don’t help. I was convinced they would notice this and hotfix it but the attention to details seems to have gone away over there. Instead we get a heavily redesigned music app that is not intuitive at all. They seem to focus on the wrong topics :( Please Apple fix the Siri problems, your product is degrading...

My 11 Pro too running 13.3.

After saying ‘Hey Siri’ I wait a few seconds before the annoying ‘uh huh’ kicks in. Then sometimes it ponders and ponders then boots itself off.

It also doesn’t take me to a page that Siri asks me if it’s the page I’m looking for.

Quicker typing or voice typing into a browser I think.