A few months ago tech giant Apple had some explaining to do when iPhone users discovered that the voice-activated assistant Siri was giving women misleading information about emergency contraception and abortion services.
Now Right Wing Watch reports that Siri may well have an evil twin sister in the form of Iris, the popular app for Verizon’s Android:
Iris — Siri spelled backwards — is the popular electronic assistant available for Android phones. It’s been downloaded over 1 million times and is powered by ChaCha, the Internet’s “leading answers service with more than a billion questions answered.” In other words, Iris may be a knockoff, but it’s no joke. That’s why we were surprised when we saw the Family Research Council crowing about the Android being “as pro-life as they come” and watched their video…Iris’ answers are drawn from ChaCha, which provided a string of anti-choice answers to our questions:
Anti-abortion activists are celebrating the discovery of a kindred electronic ideologue. But Right Wing Watch notes that Iris doesn’t give such dogmatic answers to other controversial questions. For instance, “Iris failed to quote scripture in response to questions about adultery, birth control, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, and eating shellfish (which are an ‘abomination before the Lord).”