Apple’s Siri may not be the smartest voice assistant, but it sure can tell you funny jokes and handles searches quite well for the most part. However, some iPhone users were in for a rude shock when a post on Reddit showed how Siri can actually speak out a completely unexpected and explicit (NSFW) answer when asked to simply define the word mother.
Discovered by u/thatwasabaddecision (relevant username!) on the r/Apple subreddit, here’s what you need to do to make Siri curse you out loud.
Ask Siri to define the word “mother”. When she asks you: “do you wanna hear the next one?”, answer “yes”. from r/apple
Just say bring up Siri and ask her to ‘define the word mother’ to which she will read out the typical and simple first definition that we all know.
“Do you want to hear the next one?” she asked us right after, and yes we did. “As a noun, it means short for motherfucker“, she replied, without bleeping out the curse word.
We have tested this on a MacBook Air and an iPhone X and got this explicit response on both devices. It is even listed in the text results you see along with the voice response.
Curiously, a search on Bing (yes, we went that far) revealed the same two definitions as Siri, and we do know Siri used to be powered by Bing at one point. Apple moved to Google as the search engine on Siri last year and Google does not show the slang definition up front. While it also shows the alternate definition, it’s hidden in the info card, unlike on Bing.
‘Mother’ is indeed listed with this an alternate definition in the Oxford Dictionary, as Ars Technica says. So in this case Siri is using the Oxford Dictionaries API to get the definitions.
But Siri was nonetheless slayed on social media. It just goes to show that being accurate is not everything, and this latest fiasco is making Siri look even worse against tough competition.
