Will Using Siri Cost You More Each Month?

It has been nearly a month since the first iPhone 4S’ made their way to households across the world. During this time, much has been made of Siri, Apple’s new voice assistant service that comes exclusively on the company’s newest handset. But, could using Siri actually cost you money due to bandwidth overages? Highly unlikely, according to a new report from Ars Technica. While Siri may claim she lives on your iPhone 4S entirely, the fact is, she does not. In fact, Siri requires a constant Internet connection between her and the Apple servers to answer even the most mundane questions. This means the iPhone 4S must always be connected to a Wi-Fi or 3G connection for Siri to work, the second which is metered by your iPhone carrier. So how much bandwidth does Siri use on a monthly basis? According to Ars Technica:

If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

Now, consider the current data plans available by each iPhone vendor. First, Sprint (and C Spire too) offer unlimited data plans. Consequently, for these customers, it doesn’t really matter how much bandwidth Siri consumes. For AT&T and Verizon customers, however, this is a different story. Currently, AT&T offers two data plans – 200MB and 2 GB. Verizon, on the other hand, offers three tiers for its 3G data. These include: 2GB, 5GB, and 10 GB. Therefore, assuming Ars Technica’s numbers are accurate (and we have no reason to doubt them), the only customers that might have to worry about Siri’s data consumption are those AT&T customers with the 200 MB plan. And even then, it still might not matter depending on how much of that 200 MB is consumed by other processes on a monthly basis. Our advice: Siri’s monthly data usage is so minimal, it probably isn’t something you have to worry about, no matter your data plan. What do you think? Leave your comments below.

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