“When Apple Inc. unveiled Siri on its new iPhone 4S on Tuesday, in most parts of the world the personal virtual assistant app was taken as a serious plus in an otherwise disappointing upgraded handset,” Yoree Koh blogs for The Wall Street Journal. “In Japan, though, many found it tough to take Siri seriously at all.”
“That’s because the name Siri sounds suspiciously close to the Japanese word shiri – a colloquial term for buttocks that, appropriately enough, rhymes with ‘crass,'” Koh reports. “The Japanese Twittersphere immediately took to calling the voice control app the three-letter word for derriere with some abandon. The kanji character 尻 soon cropped up below Siri as a trending topic on Twitter here. In the early hours after the announcement, one local Twitter wag user pointed out that when typing ‘Siri’ into Google, the search engine asked ‘Did you mean: 尻?'”
Koh reports, “The app quickly became the target of more jeers when it spread that the ‘intelligent assistant’ won’t be available in Japan when the 4S goes on sale here on Oct. 14.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In Japan, Apple should market Siri as SmartAss™.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “krquet” for the heads up.]