Cat Got Your Tongue, Siri?

It has been a bad day for Siri, the speech-recognition personal assistant that’s built into Apple’s new iPhone 4S.

Reports started cropping up around 11 am PT from users around the U.S. saying that Siri — which, to be fair, is still in beta — was unable to connect to its servers to complete searches. The problem appeared unrelated to geography or carrier, but seemed to be affecting significant numbers of users intermittently.

While I was able to compose and send a few text messages through Siri, it was unable to complete any tasks that required searching the Web for information, like answering the queries “What’s the weather like in Paris?” or “What’s Apple’s stock trading at?”

Apple has not responded to requests for comment.

One final thought: Siri’s error message in cases like these should always be “I’m sorry, I can’t do that right now, Dave” — regardless of user. What a missed opportunity for more “2001” high jinks.