Can I use Siri to tell me the time without using the Internet?

I only use Siri when I need to know the time. And she can't do it 80 percent of the time.

In a scenario: phone is in my pocket, I am listening music through earpod. And I want to know the time without taking phone out specially in cold. But on the way internet connection sometimes sucks. When she finds the connection, she brings an article about Time magazine.

After tries and talking to myself on the road. She tells me the time. But sometimes I have to take the phone out, again it is cold and I already talked to myself in the crowd.

  • me - Hey Siri, What is the time ?
  • siri - I can't get any request right now.
  • me - Ok Siri, What time is it?
  • siri - Here is a article about Time magazine. (WTF)
  • me - Ok Siri, Time, time, time.
  • siri - It is 19:08.
  • me - fckiss you siri.

So is there a way to force Siri to tell time without going internet? It would be better if I could make her tell the time in my native language though. It is shorter.


Siri needs the internet to do voice recognition. It doesn't understand your question without first sending the audio of you asking up to a central processing system.


The basic answer to your question is that Siri, as of now, still cannot work offline. Cortina on Windows phone can, so there is hope that at some point in the future, Apple will bring that ability to Siri.

I have a couple basic quasi-suggestions. The first is to use Voice Control. It's basically what came before Siri, and if you disable Siri, that's what comes up when you hold the Home button. Here's an article that explains how to use this. I can confirm this is still available on iOS 7, have not checked on newer versions of iOS.

The second one is VoiceOver. You can enable in Accessibility settings that when you triple tap the home button (or maybe the pause button on the Ear Pods), it activates VoiceOver. Then the phone will read whatever element of the screen is selected. This works better if you're not listening to music, because then if you just push the home button to turn the screen on, the time will be selected, but if you're listening to music, it'll read your current track position.

What I would personally do is press the pause button on the Ear Pods, then triple-press it to turn on VoiceOver, and hopefully it'll read the time. If there's no notifications.

If nothing else works, then you're stuck taking out the phone and glancing at the screen.


With the exception of the phrase "Hey Siri", Siri must have an active connection to the internet to interpret it what you say.

However, if you disable Siri, you will get the old-style Voice Control functionality. This can and will work offline. It just cannot do as much as Siri can.