

Ask HN: is there a technical reason Siri is not available on the iPhone 4? - nuromancer


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akshaykarthik
I was under the assumption that Siri needed the 4S's DSP capabilities on the
new processor.

It seems that it can be put on iPhone 4 as well
(<http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/15/siri-iphone-apple/>)

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ralphwroberts
It could be that Siri requires the extra processing power of the A5 chip. If
this is true, though, I don't understand why Siri isn't available on the iPad
2. It's silly to not give it to iPad users solely to drive 4S sales.

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rbarooah
I don't really understand why so many people expects a billion dollar service
to be given away free to customers who didn't even know it was a possibility
when they bought their equipment.

Why shouldn't all software anyone writes be given away free to anyone who has
hardware that can run it?

However, from my experience so far, I suspect there are a number of technical
reasons:

1\. The microphone quality and position of the user relative to the mic.

2\. Service Scaling - it is only just keeping up with the current user load.

3\. Optimization - it's only just good enough as it is. I'm pretty sure Apple
will be working hard to make it more responsive and more capable. More
platforms would divide their resources. If SIRI was mature, this wouldn't be
such an issue, but it most certainly is for now.

4\. Integration - this is related to point 3. Siri is integrated into the
phone well enough to be useful. It's good for reminders, notes, and meetings,
plus the odd calculation and find my friends request. It works well enough to
make a genuine difference to these kinds of task, but it has a long way to go
before it is a universal UI.

Since more people have phones with them all the time, it makes sense that much
more of this kind of assistant functionality will be accessible on the phone
platform. Therefore, Apple will be focussing on maximizing it's utility for
phone use cases first. See my earlier comment on divided resources.

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joshontheweb
If I remember correctly John Gruber theorized that the reason for offering
siri on the 4S only was just a way to keep the initial number of users down
while they are still testing it.

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asto
Plenty of users are having problems with a sluggish server. Maybe they just
don't have the server resources so accommodate more people.

