Apple Says Siri’s Abortion Answers Are a Glitch

Apple said Wednesday that the apparent inability of Siri, the virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S,  to retrieve information about abortion clinics and women’s health services in some areas was not intentional or deliberate.

The company attributed the problem to kinks in the product that were still being ironed out. Siri is officially still a beta or test product.

“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,” said Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple, in a phone interview late Wednesday. “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.”

Siri’s odd behavior was first noted earlier this week by several bloggers who found that they were not able to get complete or accurate results when searching for information about reproductive health services. When asked to find an abortion clinic in Manhattan, for example, Siri’s answer is: “Sorry, I couldn’t find any abortion clinics.”

The service’s answers and nonanswers quickly began to attract attention around the Web, prompting several organizations, including the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, to release statements asking Apple to address the discrepancies.

Norman Winarsky, who runs a research and investment firm called SRI Ventures and was one of the founders of Siri before Apple bought it in 2010, said in an interview on Tuesday that data from the third-party services Siri uses to generate its results could be causing the disconnect. Mr. Winarsky said he had no knowledge of how Siri was changed after it was acquired by Apple.

 

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