That’s me. I need Siri when I’m driving in my car. Siri worked most of the time when I had Touch ID because I could unlock my phone by feel.
I would think asking Siri for driving directions to be one of the most common requests on planet earth. Followed by asking Siri to play music or a podcast. Once again, on my morning walk, I asked Siri to play a podcast. Dead silence. I asked Siri to play some Christmas music. Dead silence. Then I realized that Siri wasn’t even available. So three miles from home, I rebooted my Apple Watch hoping that would help but no luck. So once again I unpaired and re-paired my watch to my phone. I’ve found this annoying step helpful from time to time. But I need set the watch up as a new watch. Because, why not?
It appears Siri may have been left on the back burner too long:
"One of the reasons Siri has been slow to adapt, the report says, is because of “technological hurdles” and “clunky code.” The report cites John Burkey, a former Apple engineer who worked on Siri. These problems led to it taking “weeks” for Siri to be updated with “basic features.”
Siri also had a cumbersome design that made it time-consuming to add new features, said Mr. Burkey, who was given the job of improving Siri in 2014. Siri’s database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages.
That made it “one big snowball,” he said. If someone wanted to add a word to Siri’s database, he added, “it goes in one big pile.”
These issues meant that “adding some new phrases to the data set would require rebuilding the entire database,” a process that could take up to six weeks. “Adding more complex features like new search tools could take nearly a year,” the report says."
I’ve become cautious when it comes to reports in The NY Times about Apple. According to his LinkedIn resume, John Burkey left Apple in January of 2016…almost 8 years ago.
So his insight into the state of Siri is not necessarily very useful.
When it comes to Apple, “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?
I have my local metro area downloaded for offline mapping, and I live in an area where my cellular data coverage should give Siri what it needs the majority of the time.
It still stumbles. All the time. And not like “something goes wrong once a month”, but rather “something goes wrong every time I use it.” The “something” isn’t always catastrophic, but it’s obvious that it’s failing. The other day I tried to cancel driving directions three separate times with my voice. It confirmed success each time. Then it continued giving me driving directions. 
I’m willing to believe there’s a reason for the issue each time. But the fact that there’s a reason doesn’t mean there’s a good reason.
All I know is what I read, which frequently seems to explain what I experience. I started using Siri when it was a standalone app and have watched it be eclipsed by most of the digital assistants that arrived years later.
IMO Apple’s software/services is not in the same league as it’s hardware.
Oh, that’s interesting. I’m on my third watch now, having had the original one, and then a series 4, and now an Ultra 2, and I’ve always considered them rock-solid.
But then, I’ve hardly ever used Siri on them. I think the only time I used it was to say ‘Set a timer for (e.g.) 15 minutes’, which it always did flawlessly, but now I have a the Timers complication on my screen and that’s easier.
Mine gets used as a payment device, as a way of pausing and restarting audiobooks and podcasts (which are usually playing on speaker from the phone in my breast pocket), as a way of counting my laps when swimming, for timers and alarms, and (unexpected benefit on the Ultra 2) as a flashlight: it’s really bright! Plus a few other things, of course.
But I always have my phone in my pocket so it is mostly just a remote console for that, and I’ve never had any connectivity or syncing issues.
I guess I’m confused then. I thought that they were still sending that stuff to the cloud to then come back to the phone. Is navigation canceling 100% on device?
I turned off data once to determine some of the things Siri can do offline. And it seemed that Siri was quite limited without data. For example, Siri could look up a contact and create a Note, and a Reminder. But it could not tell me how far it is from Washington DC to Charlotte NC.
Based on that simple test the information in this article seems to be credible.
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No, the navigation isn’t on-device. But after it confirms that it’s cancelling navigation - i.e. it understands the request and what it needs to do - there’s absolutely no reason that the rest of the process shouldn’t be on-device. If it’s not, it’s positively inexcusable.
And it wasn’t capable of doing that the other day. Which doesn’t make me hopeful.