Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Your Phone Has Opinions About Your Body

Siri, the voice assistant on the new iPhone 4S is proving itself fairly useless when it comes to women's health. I recently got the iPhone 4 which does not have Siri, but the other day we had some fun playing with my coworker's Siri at work.

So you should be able to ask anything and have Siri help you out. I asked it to "Get Funky" - it gave me some names of things like Funky Town Ltd and Funky Pumpkin advertising. My coworker asked Siri where he could find a prostitute. It gave him some names of escort services and online dating companies. We told Siri to "shut the f up". It said "I'm just trying to help!".

Anyhow, its been making news lately that Siri is pretty much useless when it comes to issues surrounding female health. It can not tell you where to buy Plan B, who to contact if you are being abused, where your closest abortion provider is, or what to do if you are raped. Maybe you're thinking that this is a lot to ask of a little piece of tech.

Well some of thing things Siri can tell you are -

1. where to dump a dead body ( a smelting plant in New Jersey)
2. where to get viagra
3. what to do if your viagra boner lasts more than 5 hours
4. where to try to score some marijuana
5. where to go see naked women (it will give you local strip club addresses)
6. where to get a boob job
7. where to get a blow job
8. the meaning of life (it will answer either douglas adams or monty python)

So anyhow, it seems like Siri is up for a good time but if its trying to remain uncontroversial by not knowing what the morning after pill is, then maybe it should clam up a bit more about the dead bodies and prostitutes.
The thing that bothers me about this is that asking verbally about rape or domestic abuse might actually be easier than typing it in if you have just been raped or beaten. These are situations where Siri would probably be very relevant. Siri should at least be able to turn up the results, definitions, and locations that Google can.

You can sign this petition to ask Apple to make Siri more comprehensive on women's health.






















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