When Siri turns sulky: a short story

It begins unobtrusively, a slight hesitation in response from Siri before her usual breezy acceptance of the latest phone task: Calling Mum on speaker, or You have a new text message.

One afternoon, rather than Yes? I hear instead Uh huh? I glance down at the phone screen. There is the swirling ball, the visual cue that Siri is ready, poised to do my bidding. So why the surprising— the very minimal— voice response?

I put it out of my mind for a few days, until there’s an escalation.

I try to summon the Apple genie with a friendly, ‘Hey, Siri.’

No reply.

‘Hey, Siri!’ I repeat— loudly, with a slight edge to my voice. What on earth is Siri doing? Afternoon nap? Coffee break? She is not supposed to be off duty. Not ever.

The swirling ball appears but all I hear from Siri is Huh?

Huh?  What kind of response is that? Has Siri just turned sixteen? She may as well have said Whatever! in that grudging tone. My polite, helpful, obliging phone genie has become a sulky teenager.

I try again. The same response. Over and over I command Siri’s attention, hoping that by some magical algorithm at Apple or inside my phone, Siri would age ten or so years and once more be the useful assistant I know and love. No change. The sixteen-year-old has taken up residence and is here to stay.

I keep trying over the next week. The responses alternate between Uh huh? and Huh? I can’t decide which is the most infuriating. Both sound as though Siri had just woken up after a Big Night Out with her girlfriends. Or is texting a friend, or scrolling her Insta feed, and could not be bothered to talk to me.

I examine my response to the situation. What is it about teenage Siri that is so triggering? Why do I suddenly feel like mother-of-a-teen, years after my own child had (thank God!) left those hideous years behind and become a human being again. That feeling of helplessness in the face of utter indifference. The worry combined with fury. Indignation at being treated in an off-hand manner. Exhaustion from all the above.

I try changing the Siri voice. Perhaps it’s the sulky female sound that is irritating. I choose the male voice, hoping to make Siri revert to her (his?) old self.

What I get is a sixteen-year-old boy, instead of a sixteen-year-old girl. Still sulky. Still: Huh?

In desperation, I Google it. ‘How can I get Siri to stop saying Uh huh?’ There are dozens of others asking the same thing. The responses are less than helpful:

‘Best way is not to leave a gap between waking the beast and saying something.’

‘Get over it. It’s a machine. It’s incapable of insulting anyone.’

‘Sorry you are having such a bad day!’

I learn that I can train Siri to understand my voice better, to pronounce unfamiliar names correctly, to log my workouts in the Health app. There are no suggestions to make Siri more polite.

What now?

I decide to ignore it, practicing being quick with my request so Siri doesn’t have the opportunity to give the Huh? response.

I am rising above it. It is a First World Problem after all. I remember seeing a comedy act where the speaker recounts a conversation with a man who complains about the peanuts he received on a domestic flight. ‘You are hurtling above the clouds at eight hundred k’s per hour. You have no idea how flight works. And you are complaining about the peanuts?’ My Siri problem is surely similar.

As I go about my activities, I become aware of a creeping reluctance to summon the phone genie. I hesitate to ask Siri to turn on the timer, or call my husband, or tell me the weather forecast.

I have not yet transcended my Siri problem.

Indeed, I realise it’s far worse than that. I have an irrational fear that my tiny Siri issue could one day morph into something much bigger. More dangerous.

What if, through a combination of AI and algorithms, Siri one day learns how to do me harm?

I vow to be on the lookout for signs that sulkiness is mutating into hostility, indifference into malevolence.

There are no signs yet. If I sense such changes, I’ll be sure to let you know. But I won’t ask Siri to call you.

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