The inability of Siri to provide me a way to know when I can start talking absolutely (waiting for that horrible beep is just insanely terrible) completely breaks the experience. The fact that no one seems to have noticed this flaw enough to figure out a fix suggests to me that the people developing the project do not have sufficient understanding of the interaction model to ever improve it ...
There should be zero network requests that need to be complete before I can start talking. If Siri is unavailable for network reasons tell me after (or during) my query — but don’t slow down every single interaction and add ridiculous amounts of uncertainty to the responsiveness of the interface for the sake of the uncommon cases ...