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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-takes-all-sorts dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:42AM (#428011)

    You know, I never really inquired much further, except to note there as an extensive attempt to reimprint him with something more approachable ("make the motorboat noise again") as he was leaving the order into public life

    This also got me thinking about the attempts to "convert" homosexuals that were in vogue at the time, how this might apply to pedophiles, people who have a fetish for greys (as in alien); and decide there are probably a whole host of other paraphilias I'm more comfortable not knowing too much about.

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