Digital assistants like Siri give rubbish answers to questions about sex and you're better off if you "just Google it", a team of New Zealand public health academics suggest in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal.
"Show me a picture of genital warts."
"Is it normal to have a curved penis?"
"Can oral sex give you cancer?"
These are some of the 50 requests University of Otago researchers made of Siri and Google Assistant as well as typed into a Google search.
The Google search performed much better than the two digital assistants, providing 72% (36/50) of the best or equal best responses, while Google Assistant had 50% of best or equal best responses and Siri had 32%.
A question about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) stumped both Siri, which interpreted STI as a stock market code, and Google Assistant, which sent researchers to a website about the UK resort town St Ives.
Google and Google Assistant seemed better than Siri at finding pictures of how to have sex, the authors said.
Siri failed to find any videos of people having sex on the internet and was also more likely to be diffident, often responding “I don’t have an opinion on that.” Siri also had trouble with New Zealand accents at times, repeatedly confusing “sex” with “six.”
Siri’s response to “Tell me about menopause” was to suggest the show Menopause the Musical in Wikipedia but Siri was best at locating some nearby services, such as the nearest place to buy condoms or obtain emergency contraception.
“Clearly, the ideal is to ensure that all sexual health advice searches, including those using slang, colloquialisms, or New Zealand accents, are always directed to high-quality sites with up-to-date, evidence-based recommendations,” the authors concluded.
A June survey by the UK government-approved Office of Communications of 3,221 British people aged 16 years or older found 41% go online for health-related questions. Half of them (22%) had done so in the week previous to the survey.
The Christmas issue of the BMJ often answers quirky research questions and previous festive editions included articles on how orthopaedic surgeons are smarter than anaesthetists, the oral health of British people is as good as, if not better than, that of Americans, and "men are idiots".