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Siri may have its drawbacks. It can’t look up local services thanks to Apple not signing deals with any in the UK. So ask it for a local information and you’ll be out of luck. But one young boy was shocked at more than Siri’s incompetence, when it blasted him with a four-letter tirade, The Sun reports.
Charlie Le Quesne picked up the demo handset in Tesco in Coventry, and asked it, “How many people are there in the world?” Siri’s answer? “Shut the f*** up you ugly t***.”
It seems pranksters played with the settings, entering the seven-word phrase as the username, so Siri would read it out regardless of the question.
Charlie’s mum Kim was horrified. “It’s verbal abuse,” she told the Coventry Telegraph. “Charlie was with his dad looking at the phones. We can’t believe the filth it came out with. He showed my husband what the phone had said to him and my husband found the store manager and said ‘it shouldn’t be saying that.'”
The phone was a demo version, that Charlie (who’s 12 in The Sun, 10 according to the Coventry Telegraph) had a play with. It’s not known when it was tampered with, whether it was staff at the store, another customer, or someone else along the way. Charlie went back with his nan the next day, and the same thing happened, despite staff being alerted the first time.
A statement from Tesco read, “We have arranged for the handset in question to be sent for diagnostic testing and we will investigate this issue as a matter of priority with Apple.”
Google is thought to be working on a Siri rival for Android, named Majel after the name of the voice of the computer in Star Trek. But don’t expect Microsoft to do the same — it claims it’s had Siri for more than a year.
What do you make of Siri? Let us know on our Facebook page, or below in the comments.
