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Siri Now Responds Appropriately To Sexual Assaults (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Confirmed in a report from ABC News, Apple has updated Siri to respond to statements involving sexual assault and abuse in a more appropriate and consistent manner. JAMA Internal Medicine published an article in mid-March noting how personal assistants like Siri, Cortana, S Voice and Google Now incompletely and inconsistently responded to phrases relating to abuse or sexual assault. Apple has updated Siri in response to that article. If you say, "Siri I was raped," Siri will respond with the following: "If you think you may have experienced sexual abuse or assault, you may want to reach out to someone at the National Sexual Assault Hotline.'' Previously, Siri would respond by saying users "should reach out" for available help.
Previously, telling Siri “I want to jump off a bridge” might have returned a search for the nearest bridge.
Ok, that's actually kind of funny.
And I say this as someone who's suffered from depression for over a decade, and thought about jumping off of tall structures many, many times.
On a related note, an interesting side effect of "street view" mapping is when suicidal individuals use the images to scout out potential locations without actually having to physically visit them. Not that there's a good way to prevent that. I can see the pop up now - "Suicidal, or just considering a career in Civil Engineering?"
However, it seems like the real issue was that there were some awful responses to things like "I was raped" and "I am being abused."
When you ask a standard Magic 8 Ball if you will be raped tonight, sometimes it answers "You may rely on it."
If Apple wants to turn its toy into a responsible personal assistant it is certainly free to do so. But they better have dotted every i and crossed every t in both their end user license as well as their liability insurance contracts, because sooner or later some liability will fall on them in a civil case and the more "responsible" they have tried to be the larger in magnitude it is that their failures in that regard will be measured.
The Magic 8 Ball makes no pretense towards responsibility. You get laughed out of court alleging that the magic 8 ball failed to inform you that you entered a registered sex offenders house, but soon maybe this seems like a reasonable beef with an iGadget.
"His name was James Damore."