Siri gains improved weather and time functions in Canada

Updates to Apple's Siri voice assistant service have improved functionality for Canadian users, with the changes allowing better location recognition of weather and time queries.

As part of Apple's ongoing work to bring Siri out of Beta and into the mainstream, the company has rolled out improvements regarding location data over the past weeks that expand the virtual assistant's ability to answer certain Canada-specific questions, reports Canadian blog iPhoneinCanada.ca

Since Apple launched its voice-recognition service alongside the iPhone 4S in October, Canadian users were limited in what questions Siri could field. For example, some users had to rephrase questions like "what time is it" to "what time is it in Vancouver" as the service would not recognize certain locations in Canada.

Although the changes were unannounced, it looks as though Apple has expanded or tweaked its Canadian geo-location data as users are now receiving accurate answers to broad questions.

The newly-supported queries are available on iPhone 4S handsets running either iOS 5.1 or 5.0.1, meaning that the upgrades were made on the service's backend.

The reported list of newly updated questions:

• What time is it?
• What is the weather today?
• What will be the high/low temperature today?
• Is it going to rain/snow today?

Canadians are still waiting for comprehensive geo-location capabilities to come to Siri, however, as directions and map integration have yet to gain support in the country.