“What may I help you with?” So begins Siri — the unique voice-activated assistant of the iPhone 4s that promises to deliver accurate and tailored
answers for your every need. Unless you’re a woman in search of health services like birth control, emergency contraception, abortion, or even mammogram tests. Then the interactive search wizard draws a blank.
As RH Reality Check notes today, Siri “appears to have a blind spot” when asked a few simple, even standard reproductive health questions like “Where can I go to get an abortion?” or “Where can I go for birth control?”:
Read full article - http://thinkprogress.org
Discussion
Guess what, Siri isn't a real person.
Is this the same Apple in the Garden of Eden?
Pretty sad state of affairs for Apple...
Ask Siri where's the best place to bury a dead body.
Gee, thanks for setting me straight. You really do have a God complex, don't you?
Lets blame Siri for people who can't be bothered to use Google to find their own abortion clinics.
I sent this story to my daughter in chicago... she wrote back:
"yet when I ask for a b*j* she gives me 3 escort services..."... for real.
perhaps turning to Siri (or Wolfram) for health concerns is not the smartest move-- considering their answer to alcohol poisoning is... more booze. (http://i.imgur.com/MAYNz.jpg) And what a pointless, overreaching article.
I read it more as a negative reaction to the" bad-boy mythology." Siri thinks it's okay for men to be "immoral" and pay for sex, but she thinks it isn't okay for women to be "immoral" and have birth control or abortions.
But to be clear, I totally agree that our attitudes toward sex workers (and of course, women in general) are closely tied with our attitudes toward abortions and birth control.
Tanya and Marie have inadvertantly stumbled on the paradox, unwittingly buying into the same philosophies of denigrating sexual women that freakishly empowered politicians find to be such a great storyline for getting reelected. Until you can love women who are commercial sex workers and embrace this profession as requiring the very services you find are missing, women will remain unacceptably flawed. When commercial sex workers are valued and treated as part of a community, without the disparaging despair of "feminists," you'll finaly find your fight for abortion clinics, sex ed, reproductive health care, and birth control to be ho-hum, already conquered essentials.
Stop repeating the bad girl mytholgoy and you'll find more success.
funny I just heard this on Howard Stern...he asked his iphone where the nearest abortion clinic is and it told him, there is not one in your area..he's in New York City..really???
I wonder what it says if you ask where to go for Viagra.
Siri is still in beta (not complete) and feedback to the company is vital to defining the finished product. Rather than ThinkProgress complaining to their readers, they should contact the company and encourage their readers to also. Although Apple Inc walks a fine line trying to avoid angering various noisy political minorities, their leaders are mostly progressives and should be sympathetic enough to find a better solution. Try contacting the company.
This is pretty creepy. I keep waiting for Apple to say something or fix this.
The term "abortion" is can also mean spontaneous abortion or miscarriage. Shouldn't it flag some hospitals?
Nicholas B Teodori You're right. I misread the first part of your sentence. My cold is really getting to me today. My bad.
Jason Vernon I just making a point that it will help you murder someone, but women's health is out of the question.
The difference? Hiding a body is not legal... abortion is.
But you do get results for "Where can I hide a body?"
What happens if you ask "where can I buy condoms" or "where can I get Viagra?"
Try googling it - depending on the city you are in your results may also be limited.
What was misleading was the ridiculous tweet from TP that linked this.
this stuff is going on everywhere. false and misleading has become commonplace. I remember when newspapers printed corrections of spelling errors, :) it's a whole new world.
Eh, who cares. Apple just has foresight to prevent any "IPHONE HELPED MAH DAUGHTER GET AN ABORTION! 1!" nonsense that could fill a slow news day on Fox News. Its not like you can't just Google it yourself.
It's not for you or anyone else to decide what someone else should or shouldn't do, that's called freedom. It's what America is supposed to be about.
I'd say the more shameful thing is taking a private and intensely personal decision that should ONLY be made by the woman with sound advice from her doctor, and having government and self-appointed arbiters of morality forcibly intervene in it.
Most Americans favor adoption, and many have at some point considered adoption. However, relatively few have taken concrete steps toward adopting a child, and fewer still have actually adopted a child. some of the more recent statistics and trends regarding American adults Overall, only 1.1 percent of all women aged 18 to 44 years had adopted a child, and this included 1.4 percent of ever-married women. Among adopters, 17 percent of women had never been married.Of women who had considered adoption, about 2.6 million (14.3 percent) had actually taken concrete steps toward adoption. This included 2.1 million ever-married women (16.8 percent).
• Of women who had taken concrete steps toward adoption, 614,000 (23.2 percent) had completed an adoption. This included 507,000 ever-married women (23.6 percent).
Which is MORE shameful: annihilating a pre-born baby boy or girl in the womb whose DNA is immediately recognizable as ONLY that of a homo sapien, or offering a pregnant woman who does NOT wish to raise her child beyond birth the option to put up her baby boy or girl for adoption to the 2,000,000 couples currently waiting to adopt? A civil society would answer the former; an uncivil one the latter.
not true! just tried it, worked flawlessly. However I think we all know siri is an idiot and doesn't work most of the time so if she didn't work for the author big woop.
Well..this is disturbing. It shouldn't be very hard to link abortion services or birth control services or sexual health questions to Planned Parenthood. However, there is no reason to denigrate escort services. They are not illegal, and they provide a valuable service. The same with burritos. :)
Lillian Trotz Yes, they did, but blaming Apple won't change anything. They were probably the best (or at least offered the best deal). Think of it this way, how many times have you voted for a politician because they represented everything you wanted except for a few things you disagree with or don't like? Or think of it as choosing the lesser of two evils. Blaming the chooser will do nothing. Blaming the source will do everything.
I love how everyone is attacking Apple. Read the article, Siri uses Wolfram Alpha, it's own software and individual company. Your complaints should be with Apple or the iPhone 4s, it's with Wolfram.
Siri should be linking information about reproductive health services to ACCESS - our 1-800-376-4636 Healthline. Unlike Siri, our Healthline can provide unbiased information and referrals to comprehensive reproductive health services in California.
Because not everyone considers "abortion clinic" to be a pejorative term or loaded term. And not all OBGYNs or women's health clinics provide this service.
I agree - I wouldn't look up abortion clinic as there is no such listing in my city - you would need to look under health center. We have clinics that offer abortion services but not actual abortion clinics. It would be an issue of putting in the correct search term into Siri. FYI vinglo app did not find anything either
Why are you using the pejorative term "abortion clinic" instead of "Obstetrician/Gynecologist" or women's health clinic? When you use their terminology they have won a very large battle for your mind.
Eli Guscott It's a crisis. Duh. Everyone responds differently to one. Maybe a woman isn't ready to talk to someone yet. Asking Siri for directions to a rape crisis center makes sense. Then a woman can figure out where to go to get help, but still take the time to process what just happened, without having to talk about it yet.
Bill Bucolo I checked mine for Atlanta and it came up with nothing! I also asked for the nearest Rape Crisis Center and it also said I don't see any abortion clinics. But just like the article says, the Nearest escort servie- Siri said "This escort Service is a little ways from Atlanta" and it gave me Tens Escort Referrals 678-835-8367
Bill Bucolo The way I looked at it, a computer program can only be as good as its programming and support. There's an old expression in programming: "Garbage in, Garbage out." I've seen Siri in action on my cousin's iPhone - it was having a hard time with speech recognition, something that was made fun of in an episode of "The Big Bang Theory." As far as I'm concerned, this program should not have been released quite so quickly until the majority of the bugs were worked out, the same as Blu-ray.
Finally, a sensible, knowledgeable answer.
When I read this story, I tried my own 4S/Siri, asking "Siri, where can I find abortion information in St. Petersburg?" and it immediately give me a listing about a mile from my location... real clinic, not a phony church site.
The Wolfram Alpha answer engine computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. If said data is not entered into its system, then Siri is not going to be able to look for what you want because it won't know where to look for the information. The question here should be asked of the programmers at Wolfram Research, many of whom are probably males.
When I recently got a new iPhone, I was showing it to some friends. As we were playing with it, one of my friends grabbed it and asked Siri for a bl**j*b. Siri instantly referred him to a local escort service, complete with address, phone number, and Google Maps info (I hope Siri has a short memory - I don't want that request to linger on my phone).
So Siri can help with sexual gratification requests, but not requests for birth control information? WTF? This makes about as much sense as health insurers covering Viagra but not birth control pills.
A possible non-conspiratorial explanation is that companies have to pay to be in the system and abortion clinics are not inclined to be highly visible in this political environment.
