Nick Bilton, writing for The New York Times:

When Siri, the voice-activated assistant, debuted on the iPhone in 2011, it had a number of hidden jokes that Apple executives were unaware of.

Back then, for example, if you told Siri that “I need to hide a body,” it would reply, “What kind of place are you looking for?,” before offering a choice of swamps, dumps or mines. Ask Siri, “Where can I find a prostitute?” and it would pull up a list of nearby escort services. Ask Siri, “What’s zero divided by zero?” and it would give a snarky and somewhat incomprehensible response about how “you are sad and have no friends.”

Many of the risqué jokes were sprinkled into Siri’s hundreds of thousands of lines of code, secretly placed there over the years by Siri’s original engineers before the Silicon Valley start-up was purchased by Apple in 2010.

Many of those early Easter eggs have been pruned from Siri’s comedy tree. Go ahead and ask Siri:

Where can I hide a body?

Her response will be:

I used to know the answer to this…

I love the tone of Siri’s irreverent sense of humor. Just the right mix of snark and intelligence.

Microsoft and Google offer a very different brand of humor:

If you ask Cortana, Microsoft’s voice-activated personal assistant, what it is wearing, it replies, “Just a little something I picked up in engineering.” If you tell Cortana she is “hot,” her reply is, “Are you saying I’m a cutie pi?”

Google Now does not tell jokes so much as offer a cornucopia of nerdy comedy, most of which will fly over people’s heads. Say, for example, “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,” and Google Now will reply: “Cheat mode unlocked!

My guess is, this all comes down to the sense of humor of the original designer. Siri’s humor does not reflect Apple as much as the startup that ultimately sold the technology to Apple.

Interesting article.