Technological devices are meant to be our aids. They're there to help us and make our lives easier, not to swear at us and tell us what to do or where to shove it.

Charlie Le Quesne, a 12-year-old British boy from Coventry, was at an Apple store testing an iPhone application called Siri. Siri is billed as a "knowledge navigator" or a "computer you can talk to," like we see in so many sci-fi films.

But when Charlie asked the app, "How many people are there in the world?" it responded with a stream of profanities: "I'm not sure what you said there … shut the f**k up …"  

The boy's mother, Kim Le Quesne, said she was appalled by what she heard the mobile phone tell her son. "I thought I must be hearing things, so we asked again and the same four-letter stuff blared out," she told the Mail newspaper.

Le Quesne couldn't see the funny side of it and complained to the shop assistants.

Shopkeepers apologized on behalf of the disgraced iPhone, and subjected it to an indefinite sentence in the naughty box. Staff will try to reprogram it, in attempt to make it a good phone like all the others.

It is believed that that a prankster meddled with the phone's setup to make it swear at customers.