It’s only been four months since Iris, the leading imitator of Apple’s Siri, was released to the Android Market, and Dexetra, the app’s developer, has a lot to crow about. The company claims to serve up to a million answers every day, and the number only seems to be increasing. Fortunately, the fledgling company and “Q&A service” ChaCha announced a partnership early this year, and all seemed to be going well.
Going fine, that is, until last weekend. When you’re trying to appeal to a broad and youth-oriented audience, a young upstart company is probably best to steer clear of things like this:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_TPxXEnmG4′]
There are two problems here. First, especially on issues like abortion, having such a specific and somewhat dogmatic answer is probably a bad idea, given the wide range of potential users. It wasn’t just abortion, though; other answers about rape, race, and religion were discovered by leery users like Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz.
Secondly, the video from SPLC-certified hate group Family Research Council is a problem. Just a quick primer on the FRC for the uninitiated: FRC President (and the voice on the above video) Tony Perkins scolded President Obama three years ago for not siding with Bush’s Axis of Evil. Peter Sprigg, one of their top spokesmen, is on record as wanting “gay behavior” (I assume he means flower arranging) to be illegal and wanting to forcibly deport gays. And Senior Vice President Tom Minnery was caught lying in a Congressional hearing last July.
Oh, and they have ties to the KKK. There’s that, too.
The good news is that ChaCha realized being cheered on by the likes of FRC is problematic for their “hip and with it” youthful target market and quickly rewrote the answers. Hopefully, the folks at Dexetra, who seem to be blameless here, will have a frank conversation with ChaCha executives about their expectations for Iris answers going forward.
Of course, ChaCha and Dexetra have every right to put out an application that pleases FRC and other hate groups. It’s equally correct for users to take that into consideration when choosing what apps they want on their Androids.
(Thanks to Right Wing Watch’s Josh Glasstetter for catching the video.)
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