Lonely men are increasingly turning to Siri for love and 'sexually explicit' chat

Virtual assistants - such as the iPhone's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana - are included on smartphones and computers to make life easier, allowing users to issue commands, such as "call mum", or easily search for nearby facilities such as restaurants and petrol stations. But Eckstein believes five per cent of interactions with his company's chatbot are now sexually explicit. He also claims a third of conversations take place for no particular reason, with many users just wanting to chat. Deborah Harrison, a writer for Microsoft's Cortana, told the Virtual Assistant Summit earlier this year that "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries" were about the chatbot's sex life. The issue has inspired films such as Her, which was released in 2013 and tells the tale of a lonely writer, who becomes obsessed with his operating system's virtual assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.