Stefan Mileschin

Fruity cargo cult Apple is finding that its network cannot handle the new Siri voice activated search gizmo.

Apple trotted out the Siri software as a marketing gimmick which would enable it to flog an improved iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S.

The software seems to be having a bad effect on Apple's network. It crashed last week and took a few days to fix.

Apple denied that there was anything wrong and its technical support people were simply suggesting "turning it off and on again" which did not work.

Fanboys have been flooding news groups to praise the fact that Siri politely tells them that the genius software has several different messages when it bombs. These range from "Sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the network," and "Sorry, I don't have a network connection."

Apparently it is really clever that Siri maintains her personality, even when the network's down.

There are signs that Google is a little worried about Siri. Although the outfit has in the past denied that Apple's latest toy will cause it problems, Google's Eric Schmidt has said that the software is a direct challenge to Google.

In a written response to a US government anti-trust inquiry, Schmidt talked about how much competition his outfit was getting these days. Actually the quote was not that strong, but was immediately received by the Apple friendly press as Schmidt claiming that Siri was a "Google killer" .

Schmidt also pointed to Facebook, Twitter and traditional competitors such as Microsoft's Bing.

Calmer heads have since pointed out that Siri is not going to do anything to Google, even in the longer term. This is partly because Apple will never licence the technology to other phone manufacturers and Siri is not a replacement for the type of searches that Google does.

http://news.techeye.net/software/apples-siri-broken