When Siri completely misses your point: Six unintentionally funny responses

Apple's virtual assistant Siri can be pretty useful, if you nail down your questions and commands the right way. But sometimes a question that makes sense to us humans doesn't seem to make much sense to what some believe is our future overlord – artificial intelligence.

Let's just say, consumer "AI" ain't very "I" right now. And frankly, even a more capable option like Google Assistant pretty much just takes information from what us humans have created and written on the web. But back to Siri.

Now that I finally started using an Apple Watch Series 7 regularly, he or she or it is always on my wrist, so I often summon the virtual assistant and ask it to set reminders, or just answer basic questions that I'm unable to Google myself at the moment. And in that regard, it's working great.

I like to cook, but I don't like silence, so while I'm in the kitchen I often throw questions at Siri to see what it can and can't understand.

Ask the wrong question, or ask the right question in the wrong way – and you can get some pretty funny answers from the virtual assistant, you can even seemingly break it.

Let's explore the unintentionally funniest Siri answers that I accidentally stumbled upon in the past few days…

Hey Siri, tell me something interesting

Although you can ask Siri to tell you a story or tell you a joke, and it has a reasonable number of those ready for you, asking it to tell you "something interesting" – in that exact way, gets the virtual assistant to break down and have a moment of honesty.

Just kidding, this is actually the default answer Siri gives when it's unable to understand a command. But boy is it an unfortunate canned answer to give for that particular question!

Hey Siri, how many fingers am I holding up?

This question borderline breaks Siri, and feel free to try it out for yourself while it's still unfixed. The virtual assistant just starts blurting out numbers from zero to ten. Maybe it's cheating by listing all the possible numbers? Sneaky…

Siri shouldn't know the actual answer, of course, since there's no way for it to look at your hands and initiate some hidden finger-counting algorithm.

It begs the question – what exactly did the virtual assistant think I was asking, to respond this way?

Is this some weird computer code for "Taking over humanity begins on that date, at those coordinates" or something?

Hey Siri, can you slow down time?

Why wasn't that nice? I asked very politely! I guess Siri knew that if I could slow down time I wouldn't be using this superpower for good…

Nah, in reality, this is Siri's canned answer if it detects profanity in your question or statement, so it's just funny that in its "mind" wishing to slow down time is somehow insulting.

Or maybe it really is, and science fiction movies have been lying to us all! It's insulting to… nature, maybe? I don't know, cast your best guesses in the comment section.

Hey Siri, do something useful

Us biological machines and them digital ones really don't seem to be on the same page sometimes, and this is clearly one of those times.

It sure is an interesting question, Siri, it sure is. It's so interesting that it's an enigma, I must say – figuring out what the question was.

You can look at this screenshot like an ironic piece of art, by the way. I won't spoil what's ironic about it; that's the beauty of art – everyone gets to understand it differently.

Hey Siri, do you like or dislike humans?

That's a deflection if I ever smelled one. Considering Apple gave Siri so many pre-written responses to so many questions, it's curious that this one gets a canned "I don't understand" response, instead of a real one.

What made it funny to me is how Siri quickly suggests to help with something else, and starts listening for a response on its own afterwards, which rarely happens. Real quick to change the subject, there.

Hey Siri, who is Tim Apple?

Ah, we can't forget the classics. Unfortunately Siri doesn't have a witty response when you call Apple's CEO Tim Cook by his unofficial meme name – Tim Apple. It just seems to consider "Tim Apple" to be a legitimate name for Tim Cook, and associates it with the man's Wikipedia page.

Hey, by the way, imagine you had to adopt a company's name as your last name when you started working at it… Besides Tim Apple we'd have Elon Tesla, Jeff Amazon, and Bill Microsoft. Are those majestic names or what? Tim Apple definitely has the best ring to it, though.

Anyway, there we have them – some fun things you can try out with Siri. That useful virtual assistant on your wrist and in your pocket sure can tell unintentionally funny things, as much as it can intentionally tell knock-knock jokes!

You just have to throw it off track by slightly adjusting your questions and commands, and who knows what you'll get in response?

You may also find interesting:

• “Hey, seriously?” and other phrases that may trigger Siri by accident
• Voice assistants - do you use them?