"What can I help you with?"

That's the question that Siri — seductively — poses to you when you press her special button on your iPhone.

The answer, for the surprisingly high number of people who harbor a sexual attraction to AI voice assistance technology, seems to be "Sex me, binary goddess."

Yep — as strange as it sounds people are anthropomorphizing their smartphone assistants, conflating their helpfulness with flirtation and technological titillation.

According to a new report by marketing company Mindshare, 26 percent of people are turned on by the helpful voice on their phones and computers and fantasize about them regularly. That means one in four people you see walking down the street are sporting secret hard-ons for programs like Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Cortana, and Google's Home; cruel bionic temptresses people can hear, but never touch. Even more people than that — 37 percent — say they "love their voice assistant so much that they wish it were a real person."

Ever seen "Her"?

… Yeah. Same thing.

There's even a word for people who want to fuck Siri: "technosexual," an orientation which Wikipedia colorfully describes as someone with a "strong aesthetic sense and a love of gadgets. In this sense, the word is a portmanteau of technophile and metrosexual, which was first promoted by creative professional Ricky Montalvo to describe 'a dandyish narcissist in love with not only himself, but also his urban lifestyle and gadgets; a straight man who is in touch with his feminine side but has fondness for electronics such as cell phones, PDAs, computers, software, and the web.'"

It's unsurprising, then, that Mindhshare's research revealed that the people most likely to be attracted to AI voice software are young, rich males — people who can afford something with a Siri in the first place. Now it makes sense why the majority of digital assistants are female — a separate study by Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing says this is because both men and women prefer the "warmer" tones of a lady voice.

The same study also concluded that when the personalities of voice assistants improve and become less icy, more people are likely to develop crushes on their technical temptresses. Hot.

"It is interesting, when something acts naturally and human back to you, how much we imbue it with sentience, with human personality.” Martin Reddy, co-founder and chief technology officer of Pullstring is quoted as saying in the study.

Welp, that pretty much explains our debilitating crush on the life-size poster of Jackie Chan we keep in our office. We swear to god no one has ever looked at us that way …