Apple's Siri Personal Assistant (Photo : Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett)
Apple's Siri digital personal assistant is not answering certain questions by tablet, smartphone, and smartwatch users who have not paid for an Apple Music subscription, which could reveal access restrictions in an effort to woo users from rivals including Spotify and Pandora. When iOS device owners who are non-subscribers of the music streaming service ask about Apple Music charts, Siri responds that it cannot perform the task because the app is uninstalled.
Siri's non-response was spotted first by Pandora's co-creator Tom Conrad. In his Twitter post he jokingly said that Siri only responds if iOS users first pay her employer.
The personal assistant's responses have become famous for being quick and sometimes playful. However, they were always informative.
Some basic logic explains the situation. The Apple Music app is required for Siri to access the charts, ergo the personal assistant cannot access them if an iOS device lacks the software.
There have been some rumors that Apple added access restrictions to Siri to encourage iOS users to sign up for its music streaming service. It is possible that the tech giant uses Apple Music to aggregate music data, which would make the data unavailable without a subscription, according to Ubergizmo.
However, a bug could be causing the refusal to search. The error message appeared when the user asked Siri about the most popular United States song today. However, a workaround is possible by asking about the top song in 2014, which then also provides search results for 2015's chart-toppers, according to NBC News.
