IOS – No voice feedback when using Siri with American accent in iOS 9.0.2

In my experience with Siri, the initial language setting of Siri does help a lot to help it discover your accent more quickly, but it's not the only measure it uses. It will base its understanding of your accent off of its own starting point. It's pretty difficult to convince Siri you're not American if you choose American English as its language. It will eventually change, but it takes a lot of time, and might not even be completely accurate.

I speak with a pretty standard British accent. Not northern, not southern, almost Welsh, actually. Siri's accuracy shot up with I switched to a British starting point.

I suspect that over time, Siri will eventually categorise your accent correctly regardless of its own language setting. This is evidenced by the fact that after a few tries, some of contacts' names (ones that a computer would have a hard time pronouncing correctly) are recognised now whereas they weren't originally.

The key is that Siri will attempt to categorise your voice into an accent. It will not necessarily learn your own specific accent, but it will broadly put your accent into a box, with a few exceptions for how you pronounce proper nouns like places, sports teams, people, and even apps.

As of right now, no, the new Maps app lacks transit directions. Instead, when you select Public Transit as your travel mode, it pops up a list of installed (or available from the App Store) apps that can provide local transit directions.

And, as of right now, no, there is no Google Maps app in the App Store (though you can still use Google Maps effectively from Mobile Safari).

There not much to do but conjecture as to why the Apple-made Maps app doesn't include transit. From Dan Moren's excellent iOS 6 review at MacWorld:

This is an odd solution for Apple, which usually prides itself on providing a consistent experience. But I suspect that handling public transit directions simply wasn’t an option for Apple at this point, and if it came down to offering a third-party experience versus no feature at all, Apple opted to not leave its users completely high-and-dry.