Siri briefly mistook 'Despacito' to be national anthem of Bulgaria

We are living in a time when our smartphone or tablet may have a disembodied female voice that communicates with us and handles instructions ranging from contact calling, schedule setting, and web searching. Foremost among these digital assistants is Apple’s very own iPhone companion Siri, and until recently her search engine of choice when looking up info from the internet is Microsoft’s Bing.

That changed when Apple reconfigured Siri to use Google. The official reason for the change was a better web search experience, but instead, it seems that Siri has started getting some facts jumbled. On late Wednesday, information went viral that the Apple assistant apparently thinks that the national anthem for Bulgaria is the hit reggaeton number “Despacito.”

Embarrassing error

The Republic of Bulgaria is a southeastern European country that was once part of the Soviet Union sphere of influence, until the collapse of the Communist bloc in the early 1990s. Its national anthem, verifiable online when using search engines is called “Mila Rodino” or “Dear Motherland.” But if an iPhone or iPad user were to have put the question verbally to Siri in the middle of this week, she would have answered instead that Bulgaria’s anthem is “Despacito,” a song by Puerto Rican artists Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee.

One of the Siri users who realized this issue quickly spread the word on Reddit. Pretty soon more Apple gadget owners were asking their versions of the digital assistant what Bulgaria’s national anthem was, verifying that Siri always returned “Despacito” as a result. There could be no musical confusion between that and “Mila Rodino” either, with its operatic orchestration being a far cry from the catchy Latino beat of the reggaeton song. Interestingly, other digital helpers like Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft Windows 10’s Cortana all got it right.

Quiet repair

Apple’s switchover from Microsoft Bing to Google as the source search engine used by Siri from last week has been touted as a possible suspect for the assistant’s misinformation.

The Google change also applied to other systems in Apple’s wider network, like Spotlight on Macs and iOS Search. The legendary computing giant affirms that they continue to maintain good working relationships with both Microsoft and Google, though it still does not quite explain the “Despacito” debacle. And no explanation might be forthcoming. Apple has quietly patched the problem, making Siri correctly give “Mila Rodino” as Bulgaria’s national anthem.

“Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, with a remix featuring Justin Bieber, recently broke the record for the most streamed song online in history. On YouTube it eventually overtook “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa as the most-viewed video. You can check Siri on that.