Apple confirms Siri not ‘anti-abortion’
A chunk of the internet growled at Apple yesterday over its Siri feature being ‘anti-abortion’, and I suggested it was probably not intentional. Sure enough, Apple has now responded, and it’s confirmed that this issue is a “glitch”:
Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want. These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks.
I can’t say I’m surprised by this, but I will happily admit I’m glad.
Well, ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’. I’m not wholly convinced. If Siri can deal with “I’ve had a five hour erection” (http://www.webpronews.com/apple-siri-abortion-answers-not-intentional-omissions-2011-12), surely it should be able to interpret “abortion” correctly. That doesn’t require any real natural language processing.
I can believe that maybe one of Apple’s data suppliers has a suspicious attitude, though. At the outside, it’s possible that abortion is such a taboo subject that literally no one could bring themselves to mention it during voice training exercises.
But let’s see what happens when Siri 1.0 comes out.
Siri has plenty of other knowledge gaps, too, but I don’t see people arguing Apple is ‘anti’ those things. If the situation remains when 1.0 is here, fine, there’s something wrong at Cupertino. But Siri’s work-in-progress software that utilises very few sources at present and is also full of bugs. And given Apple’s generally liberal stance on social issues, being anti-abortion would be at odds with how the company swings.