Siri and Google define ‘b****’ as ‘black slang’ in controversial dictionary tool

Tech firms unlikely to be directly to blame for the definition, since both automatically pull in information from elsewhere on the internet

Voice-controlled assistants like Siri and Google Now could be a way into your phone (Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Siri and Google have been criticised for defining the word “bitch” as black slang.

Both services appear to be pulling in a definition that includes the claim that the word is “black slang” for “a woman”.

The definition is “beyond offensive”, wrote Taryn Finley in The Huffington Post.

Both Google and Siri, when asked to “define Siri”, come up with almost identical responses. The first is the original term — “a female dog, wolf, fox, or otter” — but beneath that is its derogatory meaning.

It isn’t clear where Google or Siri are pulling the definition through from. Though the wording of the definition closely mirrors the Oxford American Dictionary, the current version of its entry doesn’t include the mention of “black slang”.

Siri and Google — which both pull their definitions from around the internet — appear to have taken an earlier version of Oxford’s definition of the word.

The phrase appears to have been present in Google’ definition since at least January, when blogger Tanya Parker pointed out the increasing use of the word “bitch” on the internet and made reference to the phrase.

It is not the first time that automated Google processes have led to the company being accused of racism. Earlier this year it emerged that Google Photos’ automated tagging tool was identifying black people as “gorillas” and putting them into a special folder.

A similar thing happened to Flickr’s auto-tagging tool, which also identified black people as apes. Flickr said that it fixed the algorithm.

It is also not the first time that technology companies have been accused of being prejudiced in their dictionary definitions. Several products used the definition “person of subnormal intelligence” for retard in 2013, but that has since been removed.