Difference in English languages in Siri

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Level 1

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Difference in English languages in Siri

I bought an iPhone 4s and have been loving it, but I'm having a problem with Siri.

I'm an Australian who has moved to the US. I have a strong Australian accent, and when Siri is set to English (United States), it never understand it when I say "Home" or "Note". These are very important words for Siri, and because it never understands me I can't things like "Remind me to do this task when I get home", or "Note to self, blah blah blah."

When I set Siri to English (Australian), it understands me every single time. Thing is, you can't leave it in English (Australian) because Siri refuses to do quite a lot of things in the US unless English (United States) is set.

Does anyone know if there's a way around this limitation for people like me who have our "language" on the phone but are limited by our location?

To the people at Apple, can this restriction please be unlocked? We live in a global community now, where people living in different countries is nothing out of the ordinary. Doesn't locking the language or dialect to a set location give the wrong impression?

L

iPhone 4S-OTHER, iOS 5, Siri

Posted on Oct 16, 2011 9:15 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,078 points

Oct 17, 2011 6:23 AM in response to iso250

iso250 wrote:

To the people at Apple

For them to see your comments, repost them here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

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Answer 2

Oct 19, 2011 5:14 PM in response to iso250

I have exactly the same problem, an Aussie living in the US and I just posted about it this morning. It seems there's no way to side-step the locking of language to location-services, which to me is simply bizarre and extremely short-sighted.

The language choices elsewhere on the iPhone do not seem to imply or restrict any localtion-related services, the location of your carrier or Apple account or sometimes GPS location is determining. Not making Siri work this way is just inviting frustration for no good reason as far as I can see.

Anyway, probably the only way to get Apple to fix this is to get as many people as possible filing bug reports on the feedback link that Tom posted earlier in this thread. Time for some crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile, I'm practicing rolling my R's and pronouncing every vowel completely and with a nice twang.

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Answer 3

Oct 26, 2011 1:26 PM in response to John Wainwright2

Me too I'm having the exact same problem, im a Brit in LA. I changed siris accent to British English so that words like WATER ( aka US 'wadder') etc could be understood and it worked perfectly, now I get told to change it back to US English if I'm searching g for businesses in LA.

Seems to me as though Siris accents are connected to their country of origin?

I think this is something APPLE are going to have to work on. I did hear someone say that Siri over time learns your accent like txt used to work but so far not much luck for me.

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