Siri is easily one of the best features of the iPhone 4S, but with the service’s growing popularity, many have wondered how extensive use of Siri could affect their mobile data usage. Ars Technica has conducted a series of tests to discover the answer, concluding that Siri hardly uses any data at all.
The tests included asking Siri to retrieve information from WolframAlpha and other online sources, as well as performing tasks like creating reminders, dictating messages, and creating alarms. Ars Technica measured data usage during these tests, and found that Siri consumes very little data – an average of 63k of data per inquiry.
If you own an iPhone 4S and perform all 11 of these same queries every single day for a month over your carrier’s 3G connection, you can expect to use roughly 20MB or so in a 30-day month. 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.
This is good news – while you might waste a lot of time asking Siri silly questions, you can rest assured that you won’t be wasting much of your mobile data limit in the process.