If there’s one thing more terrifying for repressed parents than explaining the birds and the bees to their kids, it’s the fact that their Google Assistant smart speaker can do it now, courtesy of a third-party Assistant action. Meet Pleasure Finder, advertised as “the first ever sexual education Google Assistant action dedicated to improving sexual health and performance.”
Firing up the action is as easy as telling Google you want to talk to Pleasure Finder or structuring questions directly by prefacing them with “Ask Pleasure Finder.” It works for both smart speakers and displays, though the only benefit you get on the latter is the ability to visually read back responses.
The action offers mostly textbook clinical answers like this.
The action offers to “improve your sex life” with tips and answers to the bedroom’s biggest questions, like, “am I having enough sex?” and, “what are the health benefits of vibratory stimulation?” As such questions clarify, the app does include some “mature” content, but it’s far from pornographic. Questions are answered in an outright clinical way, without any slang, using precise medical terminology, and with no (intended) humor. That makes sense, as the action’s answers were written with the help of a both urologist and a psychosexual/relationship therapist.
In fact, the developers claim the Pleasure Finder action was “rejected outright by another leading firm,” probably implying Amazon didn’t want to deal with big scary sex questions in Alexa.
The only real drawback is a small pool of answers. While there are many examples on the action’s listing, that list seems to all of the questions that it’s able to provide answers for. Simpler or more frankly obvious sex-ed questions regarding things like pregnancy (i.e., how is babby formed) don’t seem to work.
If you look at the list, you may also notice quite a heavy stress placed on things like sex toys and vibrators, and that leads me to one eyebrow-raising addition: Many of the answers are little more than ads for sex toys — commercials veiled in educational altruism.
Above: What I got when I asked about pregnancy. Below: A thinly-veiled advertisement.
The developer behind Pleasure Finder is MysteryVibe, a sex toy retailer, and while at least some of the action’s answers are straight-up educational, others are structured in a way to overtly mention the company’s vibratory products.
We laugh (and there was much laughter about some of the specifics of this Assistant action in the AP Slack), but sex education is a serious and honestly very important subject, given the immense ramifications that a failure to educate — or, worse, an ignorance-based abstinence-only education — can impose on someone’s life.
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