Ever since upgrading to iOS 7 on both my wife's iPhone 5 and my iPhone 5S, Siri seems to be having issues when calling contacts. No service problem...five bars of signal strength but sometimes if I tell Siri to "Call John Doe" she'll reply with "Mobile or Home". I choose either one and Siri's next response is "I'm sorry, but I can't make that call right now." (or something similar to that). Any ideas?
iPhone 5s, iOS 7
I get, "I can not take any requests right now." It happens half the time and sometimes will just freeze after my response and not send a reply to my messages. So annoying :/
To amplify on this, the actual problem seems to be calling a business contact vs a personal contact. If the contact was created as "John Brown" using first and last names, then Siri finds it just fine. But if the contact was created by putting only the business name in the Company field, such as "Smith Automotive" then Siri never finds the contact when "Smith Automotive" is spoken. If I say "call Smith Automotive" Siri responds with "I can't find Smith Automotive in your contacts. This problem NEVER occurred with iOS 6, so something has definitely changed.
I've been seeing similar problems. I have three contacts with "Shannon" as a first name. When I tell Siri "call Shannon", instead of responding "which one?", she would only recognize "Brian and Shannon Smith". Even if said "call Shannon Smith" she would only find "Brian and Shannon Smith" (which didn't even have a phone number associated with it, which she tells me). Oddly, when I said "send a message to Shannon Smith" she chose Shannon Smith as expected.
I have more of a problem with businesses. Siri has a hard time with business names at times especially if the name of the business has a person's last name or words with ambiguous pronunciation or non-standard words. Another oddity here: she can't find an entry for "Menard's" but she can find it if I change the entry to "Menards".
But here's a very specific issue: I have a contact named "Bike Shop". It has always worked (even before Siri on my iPhone 4) when I would just say "call bike shop." However, since some time in August or September of this year (2013) not only does Siri not find the contact, she immediately replies "I found three bicycle shops. Tap the one you want to call" (of course the number varies dependent on my current location). The listings appear to be from Yelp and sometimes they are actually bike shops but sometimes not. I have an iPhone 5 that I have NOT upgraded to iOS 7. I'm at version 6.1 and have been for a while. Furthermore, I'm not aware of any changes I've made that could be responsible for this behavior so I can only assume its due to changes made with Apple's Siri servers. Do they have some financial motivation (through Yelp) to try to send us to businesses Siri "finds"?
So, to sum up: could the problem mentioned by the OP be Siri-centric and not iOS-version-centric? (Just a timing coincidence?)
I have a contact for a business named "Vehicle Air Pollution Complaints". Siri IOS 6.x will NOT find ever find it though it's clearly there in my contacts. Why?
Try asking Siri to find "Vehicle Complaints". She responds better to "First/Last" name combinations.
I know that I can add a fname/lname and it will work. What I don't want to do is add this for the several hundred contacts I have that are business names.
Wouldn't it be easier just to fix Siri to search the company name field too, particularly for contacts with no first or last name?
I finally gave up and renamed all my business contacts with only two names so Siri could call them. Not the way it should work (is it Apple)...but it's the only choice right now.
Siri problem calling contacts
