The issue focused attention this week on Apple’s insistence that its Siri virtual assistant cannot speak English because it lacks “voice recognition technology”. Siri isn’t capable of detecting phrases such as “tell me where my mum’s hiding” or “tell me where my grandma’s hiding” – tasks which Apple expects customers to specify via Siri – so users cannot rely on Siri to translate texts into native languages such as Mandarin or Arabic. Siri cannot translate phrases such