Roger Fingas
A social media prank is likely responsible for a rash of Siri-based 911 calls made over the weekend in the Canadian city of Regina, Saskatchewan, local police said on Tuesday.
On Sunday morning alone, regional emergency services received 114 hang-up calls to 911 in a span of just two hours, the CBC reported. In an official statement, police blamed a meme circulating on networks like Twitter and Facebook, asking people to say "9/11" to Siri, referring to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Siri is believed to have interpreted the messages as a command to dial 911, connecting iPhone owners with real operators who they then quickly hung up on, presumably out of panic.
The issue is being treated as serious, as local 911 services are required to call back on such hang-ups, preventing them from responding to real emergencies. In some instances an operator could have to call back several times to be sure there's no actual crisis.
Although Apple has worked to improve Siri since it was integrated into iOS, it remains the subject of jokes about its occasional misinterpretations — or literal interpretations — of voice commands.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
25 Comments
People are so stupid.
Apple better fix this quickly with 9/11 approaching. It was only a couple years ago that they allowed Siri to dial 911 after some blind people could not reach emergency service because they only knew how to ask Siri to call the phone numbers they needed and never used the keypad.
Damned if you do, Damned if you don't
I've been waiting for a shock jock to do something similar to this live on-the-air. Most people drive with their iPhones plugged into DC power, and if they have Siri set to respond to "hey siri", this could be a problem.
Is the problem just that people aren't hanging up fast enough when they realize Siri is dialing the emergency number? Or does the phone company put aborted calls thru anyway "just to be safe", thus giving the operators the impression of a hangup?
If it's the former, the obvious first solution Apple can implement is to make the "cancel" and "call" buttons on that screen much larger and bolder so that people needn't reach for eye glasses to read it (thus delaying their response). Another example of Apple's TOO SMALL TEXT causing real problems!