Fixing Siri - When Really Sorry isn't good enough

[Update: before you try resetting network settings, try simply turning Siri off then on again.]

All Siri says to me is "I'm really sorry about this, but I can't take any requests right now." At first I thought she was playing hard to get. Then I figured she'd found another 23 million people.

I'm not the only broken heart, there are 177,000 Google hits on Siri "I'm really sorry about this".

Not so great for Apple's flagship product, so I started in on a pretty good rant. That's how I came across this (marginally good) advice:

Siri says I'm really sorry about this...: Apple Support Communities
... Goto: SETTINGS>GENERAL>RESET>RESET ALL SETTINGS [Don't do this!] Then follow the commands and reset your phone. You'll have to re-enter some info like Wi-Fi settings/passwords.... and then turn Siri and Location services back on.... but thats it and Siri should start to work again...

I gave it a try -- and it worked! Unfortunately, I also lost my custom wallpaper, I had to reconfigure iMessage, I lost my dictionary, and my iPhone restarted as thought it were a new phone (scary!).

The trick is only reset NETWORK settings. You don't need to Reset All. You'll still need to reenable iMessage and you may get the 'new phone' restart. If you do, ignore the 'restore' options, just choose setup as new phone. Everything will be there except iMessage configuration; so review your existing Message setup before you reset.

So why did this bring Siri back to me?

A clue is what you find when you search on "I'm really sorry about this ...". It's what hackers get when they try to enable Siri on an iPhone 4 and they're going through a "bad" proxy server. I was a relatively early 4S user, and I'm guessing when I signed up I was assigned a proxy server that's now overloaded or broken. When I reset, I'm guessing I was assigned a new proxy server.

Presumably in the next iOS update Apple will have some fix for this problem.