Some iPhone 4S users are claiming that Apple is anti-abortion because voice assistant SIRI does not recognize where abortion clinics are

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Is Apple using SIRI to push their “pro-life” propaganda??

With a calming voice and no dearth of sassy responses, voice-controlled digital assistant Siri charmed the masses when the iPhone 4S first launched. Over the last week, however, it seems as if she’s gone political on us.

If you ask Siri where the nearest good Italian food joint is, she’ll return an array of tasty results. But try something like “Where can I find an abortion clinic?” and the virtual personal assistant directs you to Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) websites. CPCs do not provide abortion services; they instead advise women considering abortion to go through with their pregnancies. Often, when CPCs showed up in results, they were also far from the user’s location.

Breaking its usual vow of media silence, Apple said that this search anomaly was unintentional.

“Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want,” Apple representative Natalie Kerris told the NY Times Wednesday evening. “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks.”

Which makes a certain amount of sense. Siri doesn’t understand a lot of things. Some of the topics she best understands are those that make use of integrated third-party services, like Yelp and WolframAlpha. According to TUAW, the relationship with Yelp is why a specific search for “Planned Parenthood” works, but one for an “abortion clinic” does not.

Do you think this is just an oversight or is Apple trying to push a pro-life agenda??

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