The seven things you shouldn't ask Siri on Apple iPhone and iPad

In the five years since Apple's digital assistant Siri first graced our iPhones (and then iPads, iMacs, Apple Watches, and more), the Cupertino giant has added a multitude of funny, if completely pointless, responses to frivolous questions.

There are, however, some aspects of Siri's sardonic wit that could get you in trouble with the law, your partner, your boss, or just make you feel really awful thanks to a particularly brutal put-down.

You may have become tired asking Siri the same old questions about the meaning of life and woodchucks chucking wood, but these are some alternatives you really shouldn't try:

Ask Siri to call your boyfriend or girlfriend in front of your current partner

Apple's virtual boffin can allocate family tags to your contact list with a few simple commands, but while asking Siri to call your dad is one thing, a call to your significant other could land you in the dog house.

As retold in a humourous reddit thread, a girl fell foul of this when showing her boyfriend how "Siri can you call me boyfriend please" would place a call to him. Unfortunately, said girl had apparently forgotten to delete "boyfriend status" from her ex's contact profile, leading to Siri's painfully awkward response: "Which one?"

Ask Siri to give you a dumb nickname

Siri's habit of including names in its responses is part of what makes Apple's assistant feel a little less robotic and more like a real AI. If you are fed up for being on first name terms with Siri though, you can always mix it up and ask it to call you something else.

While it may be funny at first to be called "Batman" when engaging in "bot banter", asking Siri reasonable questions while in an important business meeting/in school class/on a date only to have it reveal your inner nerd might make the novelty wear off pretty sharpish.

Ask what zero divided by zero is

...unless you want to be hit with a "sick burn", Siri-style. Here's the response you'll get:

"Imagine that you have zero cookies," Siri's response begins, "and you split them evenly among zero friends. How many cookies does each person get? See? It doesn't make sense. And Cookie Monster is sad that there are no cookies, and you are sad that you have no friends."

Savage.

Ask for help with an addiction or illness

There are plenty of queries Siri can help you with, but we suggest you leave more serious questions to a real life expert. This is especially true for anything related to addictions or immediate medical issues, where responses are mostly mixed, with certain symptoms directing you to a local pharmacy or hospital and others greeted with complete confusion.

In short, if you need health advice or medical attention, Siri should not be your first port of call.

Say 'Hey Cortana'

The amount of challengers to Siri's personal assistant crown has grown dramatically in the last year, with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant both bringing personality and practicality to rival Apple's chatty champion.

Microsoft's Cortana was its first real competitor on smartphones though, and we suggest you never mix those two up. Here's the wickedly passive aggressive response you get for saying "Hey Cortana" to Siri: "Very funny, [your name]. I mean, not funny "ha-ha," but funny."

Anything with swear words

That's just rude. Siri will let you know it, too.

Anything which makes a call to emergency services... unless you actually need it

This should be obvious, but you should never call an emergency services number unless you are in danger or in need of immediate help. For those that do need emergency assistance, Siri is programmed to call local emergency dial-codes by saying "999", "911", and similar international numbers.

Unfortunately, pranksters have taken to abusing this system by tricking unsuspecting iPhone users. Whether it was the spate of idiots encouraging iPhone owners to ask Siri to "charge your phone up to 100 percent" in 2015 (which has now been patched) or the more blunt suggestion that you should say "108" (triggering a call to local emergency services via a re-direct service) in a more recent "Siri scam", there is no excuse for hoax 999 calls, or deceiving others to do so without their knowledge. Don't do it.