Snippet: Stop Being Sexist, Siri ☇

Paul Kafasis got an interesting result when he asked Siri for the Notre Dame score last night:

I was initially flummoxed by this result, but with a bit of research I realized this was the men’s team’s last game of the season. It was played back in March, in the National Invitation Tournament, and it was also most decidedly not what I was looking for.

Look, men’s sports are undeniably more popular than women’s sports. Given that, if both the men’s and women’s teams were playing at the same time, it might be reasonable to default to the men’s game. This, however, is simply ridiculous. Rather than showing what is likely the single most popular women’s college event (the championship game of the women’s basketball tournament), Siri is instead showing a fifteen day old men’s game from the second-rate NIT.

I’ve run into similar issues for queries regarding the WNBA and college women’s basketball through Siri in the past and have mostly chalked it up to Yahoo Sports providing the content. ESPN seems to be much more comprehensive (including recognizing that the Tulsa Shock became the Dallas Wings in 2015 and updated the logo accordingly—Siri still shows the former logo). While Kafasis is right that men’s sports are more popular, some little fixes or a change in content provider will make the experience feel that much more polished for those who do care about these things. At one point, I could have sworn that Apple used Yahoo and MLB for baseball data, so why not partner with other leagues to get the most accurate information?

Semi-related, I don’t think Siri provides anything regarding the NWSL, yet Apple’s TV app allows favorite team selection. Funny enough, Verizon’s Go90 is the streaming partner of the NWSL, yet Yahoo (and by extension Siri), now owned by the same Oath division of Verizon as Go90, is oblivious.