Hey Siri, debase me in the most unsettling way possible.
Last week, Twitter user raybelline posted a video that’s at once hilarious and viscerally uncomfortable to listen to. Screen recording of an iPhone showed that Siri had been asked to address the user by an extended version of “haha” that seemed to confuse Siri’s robot brain to the point that the virtual assistant nearly shit the bed. Siri did take a stab at it though.
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1202477393375444993
The video posted to Twitter on December 5 had racked up more than 112,000 retweets and 272,000 likes as of Wednesday afternoon, when it found its way to the Gizmodo slack room. To be clear, the cheap thrills of asking Siri to say something incredibly dumb is hardly new. But listening to Siri attempt to work out what “haaaaaaaaaaahahahhhhhh” is supposed to sound like is horrifying to the extent that many of us at Gizmodo initially questioned whether it was fake.
Obviously we had to try it.
Senior Reviews Editor Alex Cranz first tried to replicate the command by summoning Siri and then asking the assistant to change her name. When Cranz asked Siri to change her name to something similar to the text entered in tweet video, well, let’s just say the result wasn’t a one-for-one dupe.
Next, I tried it, with much better results. To do this, I first enabled the Type to Siri setting in the Accessibility section in Settings. Then, I summoned Siri and entered, “Siri, call me…” with text similar to what was shown in the original tweet. Sure enough, Siri began painfully working through the long series of H’s and A’s that I’d told her made up my preferred name.
I still can’t stop laughing at this dumb as hell, deeply unsettling Siri command and now, reader, you can too.
