The iPhone has been very popular in our school; anyone with an iPhone 4S or above must have noticed an interesting new feature: Siri, a software assistant that takes spoken orders. But how much do you know about this dictation feature? Have you just put it in some remote corner of your phone after you found out that it sometimes doesn’t function well?

Most people misunderstand  the difference between Siri, the virtual assistant, and Siri, the speech-recognition engine. The assistant half of Siri comes from a company called Siri, which Apple bought. This part works solidly, although just on basic applications. You can speak to your phone to make commands, like to set an alarm, text someone, record an appointment, which will efficiently save your time.

The problem with Siri comes from its dictation feature. The text-to-speech part of Siri is provided by a company called Nuance. When you dictate, you generate an audio file that is transmitted to Nuance’s servers; they analyze your speech and send the text back to your phone. That is why, when your Internet signal isn’t great, Siri may come up short. When you’re on Wi-Fi, which usually provides a stronger and more stable signal than the cell network, the dictation feature works far better.

On the newly-released iPhone 5, you are able to make more complex commands to your phone through Siri, since Apple has expanded Siri’s entertainment knowledge. But the problem with Siri is still there. If you don’t have strong internet signal, Siri is useless.