How Much Data Does Siri Use?

Ars Technica takes a look at how much data Siri uses on the iPhone 4S.

Local Tasks
We performed six tasks that would be considered to be local tasks. These queries included things like, "Set an alarm for 3 hours from now," "Make an appointment for 2pm on Friday" (and then telling Siri to cancel the task), "Remind me to file expense reports when I get home," and "What is the contact info for Ars Technica?"


On average these local tasks took 36.7KB per query.

Online Lookups
The five other tasks were ones that required lookups online-some of them were questions that Siri could get from Wolfram Alpha, while others prompted us to continue to search on the Web (thereby bringing up a Google search page with the wording that we had asked Siri).

On average these online tasks took 94.72KB per query.

Text Dictations
Ars Technica also performed four text dictations through Siri. Two short e-mails (one was roughly 15 words and the other 40) and two text messages (6-10 words apiece).


The SMS messages averaged 15KB of data use and the emails averaged 72.5KB. These would obviously vary based on the length of the dictation.

While individual data use for Siri will clearly vary based on personal use, Ars Technica found that if you use Siri 2-3 times/day at an overall average of 63KB per instance, you will use 3.7 to 5.5MB of data per month. 4-6 times/day will total 7.4 to 11MB of data use per month. 10-15 times/day will total 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

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