Siri gets Election Day date wrong, Apple fixes issue

Apple's Siri voice assistant on Tuesday returned incorrect information regarding the date of Election Day in the U.S., though the problem was quickly rectified.

Earlier today, Siri informed users that Election Day was on "November 8th," an obviously incorrect response that appears to trace back to a backend data issue.

As noted by TechCrunch, telling Siri, "Happy Election Day," invoked a message that read, "Thanks! But Election Day is on November 8th." Queries asking the assistant to recite the date of Election Day returned similar results.

Apple has since fixed the problem. It appears that Siri lacked contextual data for the call-and-response questions, as the report notes an election day does fall on Nov. 8. Specifically, the next major U.S. election takes place on Nov. 8, 2022.

Siri, like all virtual assistants, has gone through its fair share of growing pains. While the technology has matured significantly from the fledgling service launched in 2011, it still suffers from sporadic, one-off errors like today's Election Day gaffe.

Apple continues to add to Siri's feature set, and with the latest iOS 14 introduced new capabilities like audio messages, deeper Apple Maps integration and more. Siri's knowledge graph has also expanded, with Apple claiming the assistant now has access to 20 times more facts than it did three years ago.

Keep up with all the Apple news with your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Say, "Hey, Siri, play AppleInsider Daily," — or bookmark this link — and you'll get a fast update direct from the AppleInsider team.

11 Comments

dewme 10 Years · 5775 comments

About 4 years ago

Oops.

I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we seemed to have survived a daylight saving time to standard time clock rollback without any major issues on our Apple devices. At least I have not heard of any issues. It seemed like for several years the transition between these time standards always caused a certain amount of temporary disruption in the inner working of the little brains in our Apple devices.

9secondkox2 8 Years · 3148 comments

Interesting.

I wonder if this happened to everyone or...

if Apple, like Facebook determines you are a conservative or liberal

and if so, which side this little gem affected.

entropys 13 Years · 4316 comments

Can’t even say it was a dateline issue!

crowley 15 Years · 10431 comments

9secondkox2 said:

Interesting.
I wonder if this happened to everyone or...

if Apple, like Facebook determines you are a conservative or liberal

and if so, which side this little gem affected.

Take off the tin foil hat, it's pretty clear that this was due to a pretty simple error in date checking, where it was looking for the 'next' election date but not including the 'current' date in the calculation. I've seen simple errors like this hundreds of times, they aren't malicious.

beowulfschmidt 12 Years · 2361 comments

crowley said:

9secondkox2 said:

Interesting.
I wonder if this happened to everyone or...

if Apple, like Facebook determines you are a conservative or liberal

and if so, which side this little gem affected.

Take off the tin foil hat, it's pretty clear that this was due to a pretty simple error in date checking, where it was looking for the 'next' election date but not including the 'current' date in the calculation. I've seen simple errors like this hundreds of times, they aren't malicious.

"But, but, but, it must be malicious! After all, Apple is a decadent evil capitalist overlord; everything they do is, by definition, malicious." /s