Last month, in an interview with The Times, Illy Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, creators of a virtual assistant and satnav known as 'Robin', said that 5% of interactions in their database are classified as "clearly sexually explicit".
Trawling the Internet for evidence of the above I discovered a Reddit forum titled: 'I masturbate to Siri and I feel disgusting'. The poster says he's a 20 year old male, who started talking to Siri sexually as a joke before realising that "it really turned me on."
The phenomenon clearly has farther reaches than one sole forum post. VA creators and chatbot companies predict such interactions and put algorithmic safeguards in place to deter feelings of emotional and sexual attachment from costumers.
Earlier this year one of the key writers for Microsoft's Cortana, Deborah Harrison, revealed at the Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco that "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries" regarded Cortana's 'sex life' adding, "That's not the kind of interaction we want to encourage."
+1 Funny and Sad?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday November 17 2016, @06:56AM
Doesn't Siri/Cortana/ store or have the ability to store all your (non-)verbal information requests, "for training, evaluation and commercial purposes", be they simple web-searches or your requests for sexual gratification? So sexy-talk with your phone stored forever? That should make anyone floppy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:03AM
The people who use Siri and Cortana are the same people who upload naked selfies. They're already shameless exhibitionists.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:12AM
I think we can all agree those people are doing humanity a great service.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:24AM
Actually no, they're not. Most exhibitionists who upload nude photos of themselves tend to be aspiring models, and as such, they conform as closely as they can to an ideal appearance that few can achieve without copious amounts of makeup and grooming. For example if you browse the nudes section of deviantart, you will find an abundance of shaved white women in makeup, and nearly nothing else. One might conclude from the example of deviantart that other races are considered ugly, pubic hair is considered ugly, and men are considered ugly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:30AM
Pretty sure previous poster meant doing a service by not reproducing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:43AM
That can't be true because I know your mom masturbates with Alexa.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @10:48AM
> Most exhibitionists who upload nude photos of themselves tend to be aspiring models, and as such, they conform as closely as they can to an ideal appearance
I think you will find there is a lot more variety to exhibitionists [watchersweb.com] than you realize.