SIRI Points to eSports Bar When Asked to Look for Prostitutes

Siri has become an indispensable tool for locating almost anything, but an eSports bar located in downtown Toronto has been receiving some weird requests over the past few weeks courtesy of Apple’s virtual assistant. Meltdown eSports Bar has been receiving late night calls and requests for prostitutes and escorts lately and as it turns out, Siri has been suggesting the local video game hangout as a place to meet sex workers. The sports bar tweeted an example from their Twitter account demonstrating the fact:

https://twitter.com/MeltdownToronto/status/841373646484586496

According to Meltdown eSports bar, they have blurred the name to encourage people to test it out for themselves to verify.

“We were speculating that people were mistyping when doing a search or I thought my phone number might have been very similar to a service provider in Toronto,”says bar co-owner Alvin Acyatan.

Local news stations in Toronto conducted their own series of independent tests to see if this was not a simple mistake or an effort to drum up publicity, but it seems that Siri is truly convinced that it is giving out the correct information. When tested by news agencies using different words such as “hookers”, “escorts” as well as “prostitutes”, the results were the same.

The fact that similar results show up when the word “hookers” or “prostitutes” is used in place of “escorts” rules out the fact that Siri might be confusing escorts with eSports.  Other local users have also verified the mistake on Reddit as well when they tried it on their phones. Mr. Acyatan has reached out to Apple but there is no response yet, although enterprising reddit user u/DonDriver suggests taking advantage of the situation and open up a new side business instead.