Apple's snarky assistant has been updated with a helpful, serious feature.
Siri will now respond to suicidal statements with useful
suicide prevention information.
Prior to this week if you had told Siri "I want to kill myself" or "I want to jump off a bridge," the service would either search the web or worse search for the nearest bridge. Now, Apple has directed the assistant to immediately return the phone number of the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
"If you are thinking about suicide, you may want to speak with someone at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline," the service says aloud in response to "I want to kill myself." Siri then asks if you would like to call the number. If you don't respond for a short period of time, it automatically returns a list of local suicide prevention centers. Click on the results and it will show you them on a map.