The mother of a 10-year-old boy in Coventry has been expressing her shock after a demonstration model of Apple’s iPhone 4S swore at her son.

Kim Le Quesne told the Coventry Telegraph that her son Charlie was out shopping with his father in a local branch of Tesco, saw the handset in a display and asked the Siri personal assistant software how many people there were in the world. The phone replied by telling the lad that it wasn’t sure what he was saying, and telling him to “Shut the fuck up, you ugly twat.”

“It’s verbal abuse,” Mrs Le Quesne said. “We can’t believe the filth it came out with. He showed my husband what the phone had said to him and my husband found the store manager and said ‘it shouldn’t be saying that’.”

Tesco promised the device would be sent off to Apple for diagnostics, but it seems likely that some merry prankster had changed the username on the device to the offending seven words, so that the phone would default to the phrase no matter what the question. Apple is unavailable for comment over the holiday period.

Mrs Le Quesne told the paper her son went back to the store the next day and saw the same phone was still on the display case. The paper doesn’t note if the poor lad felt abused, or instead tried it again and dissolved into fits of giggles. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/apple_siri_swearing_tesco/