Thursday 6 October 2011

Siri, Apple’s Voice-Recognition Technology, Means Something Kinda Dirty in Japanese.




During Tuesday’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” presentation that launched the iPhone 4S, Apple showed off the Siri voice-recognition technology, which understands natural human language.
Tech blogs were abuzz about it. But Japanese audiences were probably the most wowed of all.
Seems the word “siri” is dangerously close to “shiri,” which is Japanese slang for “ass.”
So when Japanese iPhone users took to Google Japan to get a closer look at Siri, the intuitive search engine didn’t recognize the word and suggested its closest match. Which brought up pages that may have been a lot more fun, but certainly weren’t what the user had in mind.
Apple owns more than a third of the Japanese smartphone market, so it’s rather surprising the company didn’t know this would happen. But fans of adolescent humor are probably just glad it did.


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