Now, what is Siri?
“Siri is the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. It allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. But Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands. Siri understands your natural speech, and it asks you questions if it needs more information to complete a task.
Siri uses the processing power of the dual-core A5 chip in iPhone 4S, and it uses 3G and Wi-Fi networks to communicate rapidly with Apple’s data centers. So it can quickly understand what you say and what you’re asking for, then quickly return a response.
You can ask Siri to make a call, find a business and get directions, schedule reminders and meetings, search the web, and more. You can even ask Siri “What can you do for me?” or tap the “i” in the right corner of the screen when you bring Siri up. You’ll see examples of things Siri can do, along with ways you can ask for things.”
Though, Siri is currently in beta according to Apple, many pro-choice activists are up in arms about this new virtual assistant. According to the New York Times, Siri can easy find escort services and Viagra, but can’t find birth control, abortion services, or contraception.
Apple’s response to this was that the program has glitches and is still in the beta stage, which I think is a reasonable answer, but it seems quite odd that they would go out of their way to add escort services but NOT abortion services. At best, this program is incredibly male centric.
Considering pro-life organization has claimed, “We applaud Apple iPhone’s 4S Siri and are thrilled that Siri does not list or refer to abortion clinics. Numerous lives will be saved as a direct result,” according to Huffington.com, it’s hard to declare this beta “glitch” had no hidden agenda. Although, Apple did release a statement citing that they had no intention to offend anyone.
To me, this controversy is not about a glitch, or about intentions. It’s about the unintended consequences of sexism and inequalities prevalent in our society. Even though this may have been unintentional, the fact that this error was over looked by the thousands of Apple employees who helped create this program is astounding.
Many pro-choice activists have been demanding Apple to fix this “glitch,” sign this petition if you agree.
http://www.change.org/petitions/siri-why-wont-you-help-me-find-family-planning-services
ShoutOut! James Madison University 
I really appreciate your post. I liked how you said towards the end that it’s really about the unintended consequences of seemingly unnoticeable inequality. I think this is a great example of it. This was potentially overlooked by thousands of people who spent hours trying to program any possible question/answer sequence. If things like contraception or abortion clinics were actually forgotten by people who’s job it is to make SIRI able to answer anything, then there is a real problem. We should strongly consider why it is that finding prostitute is more important to include on SIRI than finding legal things. Having said that, I do disagree a little. I do think it’s slightly important to have some level of transparency with whether or not this was a glitch or a purposeful action against pro-choicers. I would like to know if a company that I support financially (way financially given their prices…) is actively going to oppose and attempt to prevent my personal views from being actualized. I don’t care if every single apple employee is pro-life or not. What I do care about is that I would pay money for a product when they don’t show me the same respect.
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Yes, I totally agree. Although, I do not think it’s likely to occur. Sadly, but I highly doubt that Apple is going to come out and say their stance on the Pro-life/Pro-life debate. For this reason exactly, either way they side, they would possibly lose millions of costumers.
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