why does siri only work if i have internet connection?

Lawrence Finch wrote:

They made this design choice because an iPhone is not powerful enough to perform speaker independent voice recognition and natural language processing. But you are right about data collection, although for the wrong reason (or maybe only partly the wrong) reason. Voice recognition is REALLY hard, if you want the computer not only to parse the spoken word correctly, but also understand it. So Nuance (who provide the servers used by Siri) have been collecting voice samples for analysis for years...

You seem very knowledgeable in this area. I get that voice recognition is really hard, but the fact is, I had dictation software on my windows XP computer back in 2002 (can't remember the computer specs but it would be nothing compared to even a phone today) and it worked well. It even learned the idiosyncrasies of different users and learned from its mistakes. The other fact is, if I turn Siri off on my iPhone 4S I can use voice control to control the music player and launch facetime, without a connection to the internet. The iPhone 4S is at the very least definitely capable of doing these things without internet. It is also feasible that it is capable of doing other simple tasks, like making reminders, scheduling diary events etc without the internet. Anyway... it'd be cool if Siri didn't need internet for these basic tasks so that it doesn't become completely useless when the Siri servers are overloaded, or when I'm in a blackspot.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

It's so gratifying to know that you are far more knowledgeable about the current state-of-the-art of speaker independent voice recognition and natural language processing than the people who work with it for a living every day (like me).

I choose to take this comment literally. Thank you 😉

The dictation software you (and I) used in 2002 was probably Nuance's Dragon product (which they bought from the scientist who developed it). If you recall, you had to "train" it for several hours by reading text that it already knew so it could learn your pronounciation. Siri is "speaker independent" - it doesn't have to know your voice; it matches your voice to millions of others until it finds a match that it can understand.

The big difference between Siri and Voice Control is the algorithms that each implements. Voice Control is what is called a "word spotter". It knows only a dozen works or so. If you say anything that it doesn't recognize it throws it away. It also requires that the first word you speak be one it knows, and you are limited to only 3 or 4. Each word that it knows is like a button you press, so "call Jan" recognizes "call", causing it to virtually tap the Contacts app, then look for a word that sounds like "Jan". And it gets it wrong more often than right.

Siri attempts to perform natural language processing - that is, to actually understand what you say rather than just react to a couple of words. It cheats (in the view of true Artificial Intelligence researchers) in that it does this statistically, by searching a massive database for the same words until it finds a close match to all of the words in your question. IBM's Watson does the same thing, but with a much larger database.

It would be interesting and useful if the iPhone used a hybrid approach, and used word spotting on the phone for "call jan" and only went to the server for something more complicated. But then Apple would not be able to record your request to add to its database of sounds.

That all makes perfect sense. Very interesting. I remember having to train the software! lol. How nostalgic.

I just googled "voice control apps no internet" and I found quite a few. Here are two.

--> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.KnJSoftware.VoiceCommander&hl= en

-->http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speechtrans-ultimate-for-hearing/id438175633?mt=8

I haven't used either app but they both have reasonably solid reviews. In any case, the iPhone is capable of dictation and basic functionality without internet and with reasonable results.

From what you've said though, I can see why Siri was designed to be internet only.

It looks like it ain't gonna happen but, like you said, some kind of hybrid approach would be useful! Especially with the upgrades to Siri in iOS 6; the servers are doubtlessly going to be hammered. It would be nice to have some functionality in this case. It'd also be useful in that I could make reminders on my phone when I'm in my bedroom, which btw is in a blackspot (Yay Optus 😟).

Siri is not supported in IOS 6. That's what I heard. However, I can't find any article regarding this.

You heard wrong. Siri is supported in iOS 6 on the iPhone 4S and the new iPad.

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios6/

I understand that Siri is not the same as Voice Control. But the 4s clearly has the processing power to run Voice Control. For instance, I was riding my bike and had no 3G. I wanted to skip to the next song on my playlist without having to stop and take my phone out in the pouring rain. My iPhone 3Gs let me do that, so why can't the 4s? Why can't Siri switch automatically to function as Voice Control if Internet access is unavailable?

Joe Haydon wrote:

Why can't Siri switch automatically to function as Voice Control if Internet access is unavailable?

The only answer anyone here could give you is "Because Apple didn't design it that way". However, I think it's a very cool idea. You should suggest it to Apple:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Who knows what might happen if enough people requested such a feature.

The fact that Siri has to dial into a remote server just to voice dial is its most maddening aspect. On my old 3GS, I could use voice control to dial a contact in my contact list -- it was extremely quick and responsive. With Siri however, to voice dial takes forever (even with a full signal), and Siri has to talk to an Apple sever first??? Why? The contact list is already on my phone. In this instance, I hate that Siri struggles to achieve the same result as voice control used to be able to handle flawlessly on my old 3GS. It makes for a really frustrating user experience.

JJstar wrote:

I hate that Siri struggles to achieve the same result as voice control used to be able to handle flawlessly on my old 3GS. It makes for a really frustrating user experience.

If you prefer Voice Control, why don't you go back to using it?

I totally agree. Siri works beautifully... when it works. When it doesn't work for something as simple as voice dialling it completely destroys the seamless user experience Apple are trying to create. It's frustrating.

I think everyone missed the original posts point.

I can't understand why Siri needs Internet to access internal phone commands either.

For example, on my iPhone 4 when it was connected to my car kit, if I needed to say call bob then no prob, it would call straight away. However on my 4s i noticed if I tried to do the same using Siri in a Internet black spot then either the icon just keeps spinning or else she says sorry I can't help u with that. Really annoying! Surly it for internal commands it should switch to offline tech for slow Internet spots

Siri is a voice analysis based software, and like any other voice analysis tool, the most important task is to recognize the language and break up and map it into built-in commands. now, if a product is designed specifically for a particular person, this tool doesn't need to do much in itself, it can work very efficiently within a reasonable limit.

For a global product using any voice analysis based software, the task for recognizing the language itself will be a daunting task. many people say same things in different ways due to geographical change, cultural change etc.

From what I know, Siri would need internet to send the audio sample to some apple server which should analyze the sample against hundreds of samples they already have to recognize each word spoken in the audio and send the result to Siri in a concise manner. After which Siri can use its processing intelligence and interpret it into a particular command.

Xammed wrote:

I think everyone missed the original posts point.

I can't understand why Siri needs Internet to access internal phone commands either.

For example, on my iPhone 4 when it was connected to my car kit, if I needed to say call bob then no prob, it would call straight away. However on my 4s i noticed if I tried to do the same using Siri in a Internet black spot then either the icon just keeps spinning or else she says sorry I can't help u with that. Really annoying! Surly it for internal commands it should switch to offline tech for slow Internet spots

Because that is not what Siri was designed to do. Siri isn't Voice Command. Siri is a speaker-independent natural language processing app. The way Siri is designed, the commands: "Siri play Led Zeppelin", and "Gee, Siri. I'm really in the mood to hear Misty Mountain Hop, right now" require the same level of processing power; i.e. Siri has to process them both as natural language. Voice Command can execute the first one, but would never be able to understand the intent of the second. Processing anything as natural language requires a network connection to Apple's servers, no matter how simple the request. Siri is also not dictation. Siri doesn't just recognize words and regurgitate them onto the screen in text form. Siri recognizes the words, but then Siri also has to figure out the meaning of the words (natural language processing), then figure out what commands will need to be executed to satisfy the request (or if it is even a request, at all, and not just idle conversation).

That said, I like the suggestion that the iPhone should enable Voice Command when there is no internet connection. Maybe there's already an app in the App Store that does just that.

For those that care; Nuance Communications has a patent that would solve this problem. See http://www.google.com/patents/US7610204?hl=en&dq=7610204. This invention proposes to do some local characterizaion of the input speech to see if it is simple enough to process locally, or if it needs to be sent to the remote server for higher-level processing. Maybe Apple hasn't yet figured out how to get around the patent infringement and therefore has to live with network only, for now.