Google Assistant thinks Halimah Yacob looks very much like the queen of the Netherlands

Google Assistant is legit one of the best virtual assistants out there (sorry Siri!) on the market, but even clever AIs have their bad days. 

Redditor u/v1war presumably knows who the president of Singapore is (it’s Halimah Yacob), but proceeded to ask Google’s digital helper anyway. It’s an easy enough query that the Assistant had no issues with… until it pulled up her supposed image. 

In a Reddit post on Wednesday (Oct 23), the redditor posted the amusing result of the search. According to Google Assistant, it turns out that our head of state is uh… noticeably blonder these days. 

I tried it on my end, and it checks out. Google Assistant thinks Halimah Yacob is a chic Caucasian.

The picture that Google Assistant shows (and still does, as of writing) is a photo of Queen Maxima of The Netherlands, shot by Patrick van Katwijk for Getty Images. 

A check on Getty Images makes the error abundantly clear — Google Assistant had scraped data from a series of photographs taken during President Halimah’s state visit to Netherlands last year. Together with the President’s husband Mohamed Abdullah Alhabshee, they were hosted by King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima in a five-day tour across four Dutch cities. 

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When the query is replicated on a Google Nest Hub, the results are accurate. The Queen Maxima error is only seen on the mobile version of Google Assistant so far. 

When you ask it to pull up other pictures of President Halimah, the results are fine too. 

We've let the Google folks know about the amusing mistake. 

ilyas@asiaone.com