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Many of Siri’s Functions Won’t Work Outside Of The U.S.

Posted in iPhone, News on 14/10/2011 by J. Glenn Künzler

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Among the iPhone 4S’s most notable and impressive features is its new built-in Siri functionality, which acts as a personal assistant and is capable of controlling almost all aspects of your phone using natural language. Unfortunately, MacStories reports that iPhone 4S customers outside the US are finding that many of Siri’s tasks don’t work at all outside the U.S.

For instance, as in the image above, it’s apparent that Siri can only look for addresses within the U.S., and can only do so when English is used as the primary language – an unfortunate slap in the face for anyone located outside of the U.S. or who doesn’t speak clear English.

It’s especially unfortunate that the iPhone 4S’s most exciting new feature only works for one segment of Apple’s customer base, and even more unfortunate that Apple did not make this clear prior to the device’s official launch.

I’d be pretty disappointed if I stood in line for hours only to find out that the iPhone 4S’s best feature is crippled…

  • Arturo Herrera

    But to be honest I don’t really think that’s Apple’s fault, i.e. I live in Guatemala and the problem here is that a majority of businesses don’t take advantage of that kind of services, even when siri started as a stand alone app, its use here was very limited, so to be honest at least in my case, I’m not really specting that service to work flawlessly in here, but I can see your point in that being kind of a disappointment for a lot of people

    • Alex

      Yeah, but Siri supports UK english, french and german, so I hope that in Europe they are going to make some progress in answering questions like businesses or travel

  • Cyberhusky

    The problem of SIRI not working correctly outside the USA is that it needs online internet databases like Wolfram Research, Apple Server Cluster and other special databases.
    Unfortunately many of these services are only available for the US market: as these services (traffic infos, maps, hotels etc.) are free because payed by government taxes.
    In Europe most of these services are set up by companies who want to earn money. So they won’t give these infos for free.
    Plus many systems aren’t coherent and compatible with each other. So SIRI has still to learn a lot or Apple has to buy or pay these services. Apple said SIRI is still beta.
    I would also like to see SIRI understand more languages at once, without having to change the settings.

    But the potential of SIRI is very big. BMW wants to have it in their cars!

  • Boxerflat4

    Man that sucks.

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J. Glenn Künzler

Glenn is Managing Editor at MacTrast, and has been using a Mac since he bought his first MacBook Pro in 2006. Now he's up to his neck in Apple, and owns an old iBook, a 2011 MacBook Pro, a MacBook Air, a third-generation iPad, 2 iPhones, and a Mac Mini that lives at the neighbor's house. He lives in a small town in Utah, enjoys bacon more than you can possibly imagine, and is severely addicted to pie.