Media

Socialite, Internet entrepreneur, and AOL employee extraordinaire Arianna Huffington has reportedly been begging fellow AOL property TechCrunch to "declare war" on her new pet hatred - Apple's Siri personal assistant application for the iPhone.

Sources close to the Huffington Post founder say that she has grown frustrated in recent weeks after upgrading to the iPhone4s and discovering that the normally useful and amiable Siri could not understand a single word that comes out of her mouth.

Phones at the Silicon Valley offices of the internet's leading technology blog have been ringing off the hook with pleas from the Huffington side of the AOL media empire to join HuffPo in savaging the technology in hopes of forcing Apple to remove the app in its next version of the iPhone.

In an interview with The Daily Currant, Huffington outlined the reasons for her quest, "Do I really need to explain this?" she begins,  "Do I need to explain why I have launched a campaign against a product that is not capable of doing a single thing it is advertised to do?"

"Yesterday I asked Siri to find a good Thai place in Santa Monica and it sent me a picture of a Tsetse Fly in Antartica!"

"Yesterday I asked Siri to find a good Thai place in Santa Monica and it sent me a picture of a Tsetse Fly in Antartica!"

"The day before I asked Siri to schedule a meal with Tim Armstrong and it showed me a Youtube clip of a man landing on the moon!"

"I love Steve Jobs. I think he was a visionary. But this Siri thing is a completely useless piece of shit. ..I will crush Siri. I will force Apple to remove this insidious piece of technology from the iPhone. Its ruining all our lives. It hasn't worked for a single person in the HuffPo offices."

Arianna's longtime personal asisstant, however, disputes that assertion "Siri works just fine for me and most everyone else I know. We've just been telling Ariana otherwise because of - you know - the 'A' word."

The "A word" is Arianna's accent. Huffington was born in Greece and educated at Cambridge in England. Although she has lived in the United States for 31 years her accent still sounds like Aristotle Onassis doing a Stephan Fry impression.

Huffington's inner circle beleives that Arriana's misfortune with Siri is simply the result of the software not being able to adapt to her unique voice and manner of speaking.

"We're pretty sure its the accent," says a top IT engineer at HuffPo who has personally inspected her iPhone in an attempt to resolve the issue, "But we're all too afraid to tell her, so...I guess she's going to war with Apple."

Apple had no comment on the record. One TechCrunch employee with knowledge of the situation simply replied "Whatever. Not our problem anymore."