On Saturday, iPhone users around the world began testing and confirming what is arguably Siri’s most bizarre response to a question yet. Before grabbing your own phone to test this out, however, be mindful of anybody else around.
The randy robo-response was apparently first reported on Reddit’s Apple community, where a user by the name “thatwasabaddecision” suggested that people ask Siri to “define the word mother,” wait for the assistant to ask for an additional definition, and say “yes.
“As a noun,” the computer-generated voice says as of press time, “it means, short for ‘motherfucker.'”
We individually confirmed that Siri offers this errant definition, though plenty of other iPhone users have posted their own tests over the past 16 hours. (Australian Siri says it, too.) This differs from exploits that users can manually key in to get Siri to curse, like changing an address book entry to a string of bad words.
Apple’s Siri voice-navigation service has been criticized for various content issues over the years, including lackluster language support and emergency comprehension. In terms of robo-voice services going weirdly awry, on the other hand, the only recent example we have is when when Amazon’s line of Echo products began creepily laughing for no reason. Surprising and inappropriate content has frequently been discovered inside games’ and apps’ code by clever users, of course, particularly the “Hot Coffee” mod that shipped in original versions of .
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
