Siri curses like a sailor when asked for an innocent-sounding definition

Alan Martin April 30, 2018

Do you find Siri a little bit too straitlaced? Too button-down? Let’s cut to the chase: do you want your HomePod or iPhone to swear like a west coast rapper? It turns out there’s a really easy way to get Siri to turn the air blue, and it’s a little unexpected.

As discovered by the appropriately named “thatwasabaddecision” on Reddit, if you ask Siri to define the word “mother,” at first you’ll get a fairly standard response: “As a noun it means a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth.” So far, so normal. Ask for a second definition, and Siri’s cold, robotic voice shoots back: “As a noun, it means short for motherfucker.”

You’d imagine Apple will figuratively wash Siri’s mouth out with soapy water soon, and scrub the phrase from its database, but if you’re curious as to how this could slip through the net, it’ll likely be thanks to the Oxford dictionary website, which lists it as the second definition. There though, it is clearly labelled as “vulgar slang”.

I tried the same on Google Assistant on my phone, and got a marginally better result – it only read out the traditional definition, but it did still display the slang alternative in the written accompaniment. siri_swears

I don’t have an Amazon Echo at hand to test, but generally, it seems a bit dopier than Google at these things and prefers short answers. Case in point: ask both how many hairs on a cat. Alexa will tell you 60,000 hairs, while Google will say 60,000 per square inch, which is a pretty major difference. But if you’re worried that Alexa may be about to share obscenities with your child at any second, you can at least buy a version just for kids…