Somehow, through the smog of doubt and tech cynicism, the new iPad managed not to disappoint—likely owing to a retina display that’s more glorious than Athena’s cleavage. But! No Siri! Apple you screwed us again! Actually, no: be glad it’s missing.


Siri on the iPad is an inevitability, just like Siri on pretty much everything Apple will ever sell is an inevitability. It’ll control our music, turn on the World Series, and, of course, find the nearest abortion clinic. It’s integral to Apple’s far-seeing vision of the computer.

So why, if Siri is ready for iPhone 4S primetime, is it absent from the greatest iPad of all time? It’s the fastest mobile device Apple’s ever made, so processing power can’t be the scapegoat. And it’s got the most liquid crystalline eye capacity of any mobile device Apple’s ever made; just think of all the voice-automated ways we could boss Siri around. What gives?

Time’s Matt Peckham has some spot-on speculation: Siri just isn’t good enough for the iPad. Why? Because the iPad is a whole other computing beast that fits into an entirely different part of our life compared to the always-pocketed phone...

"With an iPad, by contrast, you might be sitting down at work or home to check email, your social networking sites, or browse the web. Or you might be a kid settling in for a marathon info-dive, the way one might with a book or a game or an encyclopedia. The requirements of a voice recognition app in these “settled” scenarios are much different than when you’re out and about."

He’s right. If we’re going to use Siri on the iPhone, it’ll be for quick conveniences: Where’s the closest X, play album Y, text wife Z. Things we can’t be bothered to do with our fingers. Sloth.
A Siri-enabled iPad, by contrast, could genuinely think with us. It could provide the equivalent of extra arms and an extra brain using an extra computer, working in parallel and assisting us, the way Apple dreamt over two decades ago. Imagine starting a uni paper while Siri looks up a list of Latin American countries that underwent a revolution in the 20th century, sorted by current GDP? Imagine asking Siri to pluck out every photo of your parents at your brother’s wedding, auto-enhance, and resize to something proper for email, all in one utterance.

Siri in its current form is so astoundingly far from being able to do any of this—it can’t even understand Mat Honan’s request for some Coltrane—that an iPad version would be self-parody on Apple’s part. Even in its current iteration, Siri is a beta product at best, a broken gimmick at worst...

"That speech recognition is the most obvious example of that beta. Siri’s most common reply to me is that “it didn’t quite get that.” Is this due to my (very slight!) southern accent? Is it because I mumble? I don’t know, but I do know that my Nexus rarely failed to understand me in the ways Siri does."

Worse than its failure to understand my words is its failure to understand my meaning. Siri is often quite dumb. Sure, it will do what you tell it. But it doesn’t interpret or do nuance, even though that is exactly what Apple promises

Siri blows the basics on a phone. Any attempt to cram it into your iPad, ostensibly the gleaming monolith of the post-PC era, would be disastrous. The means to interpret the kind of highly sophisticated tasks we do on computers, not phones, just isn’t there. By a lightyear. So for now, don’t consider this a missing feature. Consider it a missing failure.

There are plenty of people that like Siri and if you don't, instead of complaining about how it crappy it is, just turn it off. It really is that simple.

Yeh but we don't know what exactly is being tested. Having it only on one device could make things a lot easier for them to carry on development and fix bugs.

Your just seeing this from your point of view, you need to see it from everyone's. You probably already know how i feel about siri, but that's irrelevant. I think apple made the right move on this one. They obviously show keen interest in siri on the iPad, what with bringing over the talk to type feature. You cant complain or be mad that they made a good business decision from where they stand.

Well perhaps you dont think theres a problem with siri, but there are plenty of people on forums and in articles that do. Not to mention the amount of hate across the UK, where siri doesn't have as much functionality as other countries. This is because siri cant find businesses or use location based features here, which is a massive chunk of siri's functionality as far as im concerned.

And what are these server sided issues?

You have just assumed i was talking about the handset part only. By "Siri" i mean everything that makes it work.

And it doesn't work here because they havent managed to close a deal with anyone that has a database or whatever.