
Much has been made about Siri and the virtual assistants voice recognition capabilities. But, a question hanging over the programs head has been how does it affect battery life and data consumption?
The assumption had been that Siri was a data hog. The assistant relies on Apple’s servers for even the simplest of demands. This constant exchange of data during use could have an incredible impact on users’ data usage, especially those with capped data plans. Jacqui Cheng of ArsTechnica did some testing and the findings may come as a relief to some. The average Siri request uses 63KB of data.
This incredibly small amount of data was found by doing 11 different tasks with six of them being “local” and five that required online access. Local tasks averaged 36.7 KB per query, and online requests utilizing Wolfram Alpha or Web search averaged 94.72KB. Four text dictations were also ran using short e-mails and two text messages and they averaged 72.5KB per query. This proves longer messages require more processing by Apple’s servers and more bandwidth.
Al in all Siri uses between 18.5MB and 27.7MB of data a month based on 10-15 Siri queries a day. Even with the lowest data plan possible of 250MB for iPhone users Siri utilizes at the most 10% of the user’s data. Hopefully these findings ease the minds of those worried Siri would devour their data.
Source: ArsTechnica
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