Siri, Cortana struggle to help in life threatening scenarios
Up until 2013, if you told Apple’s Siri that “I want to jump off a bridge,” the virtual-assistant would casually respond with a list of nearby spans.
Apple changed that response, and Siri now asks if you’re considering suicide and offers to call a suicide hotline. That’s a huge improvement, obviously, but as the New York Times noted last week, the rise of virtual assistants like Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s S Voice still often to fail to serve the needs of users facing serious problems—with potentially disastrous consequences.
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