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"Raise to Speak" not working on iPhone 4s

I got my Iphone 4s today. Everything works fine except for the "Raise to Speak" feature. I have it turned on in the Siri settings but there is nothing that I can do to get Siri to start when I raise the phone to my ear. Really frustrating. I have been on the phone with Apple's support and so far nothing that they proposed worked. We tried rebooting the phone, turning the phoe off and on again, and turning the raise to speak setting on and off. Anybody having the same problem?

Iphone 4s-OTHER, iOS 5, Att 64 GB

Posted on Oct 14, 2011 12:54 PM

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72 replies

Oct 14, 2011 6:27 PM in response to Psicom

Siri is not working at all on my Sprint 32GB Black iPhone 4S. Not a single command is recognized. I was in the Apple Store today (very loud with lots of background noise) and every demo phone worked fine. When mine arrived... nothing. No Siri. 😟 Keeps saying "Sorry Something''s gone wrong. Can you try that again?" or "Uh oh, there's a problem. Can you try again?".

Oct 14, 2011 7:55 PM in response to Psicom

I think I got it to work fine now. Everything depends on the kind of moviment you do to raise your phone to your ear. If you have your arm straight down and move the phone to your ear it does not work. It works with shorter moviments. I hold the phone in front of me as if I am reading the screen with my arm bended in 90 degrees. I bring the phone to the ear and it works like a sharm every time.


How did I founf that out? I went to the Apple store and I was able to see that everybody was having dificulty with using the feature. We tried several phones and it seemed to work randomly. After spending a lot of time behaving like an idiot moving the phone up and down thousands of times I sat down and it started to work much better. That was when I realized that it was working better because I was not moving the phone from all the way down but from much closer to my chest.


Now some important information. First, the raise to speak feature works from any screen that is on, even from active application screens. For example, when reading a message, I raised the phone to my ear and it worked fine. At the apple store, some of the apple advisors thought that it would only work if you were already in the Siri screen, which is not true.


Second, I have to say that I actually got my phone replaced just in case it was a hardware issue. However, I tried the new phone still using the long moviments and the raise to speak feature would not work. I changed to the short moviment I described before and everything worked fine. I am convinced that it is not a hardware problem.


I hope this helps. Enjoy your new Iphone 4s.

Oct 14, 2011 8:12 PM in response to Gregory813

Gregory813 - Make sure you have good internet connection. Siri depends on it to send and receive data from the servers that actually run the recognition. It happened some times with me when I was in a wireless network. I turned the wi-fi off and it worked much better in 3G. When I connected to a seconf wi-fi network it worked fine as well.

Oct 15, 2011 11:46 AM in response to Psicom

For "Raise to Speak" to work, you need to turn the screen on first - can work from any app or even lock screen. Then you can raise phone to your ear from any position where you can view the phone's screen easily, e.g., holding it in front of you in any position you like where the screen is facing you. I found this to work very well.

"Raise to Speak" not working on iPhone 4s

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