If I ask Siri on my iPhone "What time is it in London?" here in Germany, it replies with the time of London, England.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#22Ranking and NLP aren't easy. If you are asking a slightly related question (for example, "What is the weather in London"), and if you are living at some place where the nearest major town is called London, but is not London in England, you would expect it to give you the weather in "your" London. However, it you are asking for the time in a particular city, then the ranking should of course consider whether the timezone of the city you asked for is different than your own - it makes no sense to ask for the time in a city which lies in your timezone. Then again, if the distance from your location to that other London is greater than a certain threshold, the question could imply that you actually do not know whether the city lies in the same timezone as your location.
All these thresholds or ranking factors seem to come intuitively to humans (I would guess a good intuition for them is actually a sign of intelligence), but it seems to be incredibly hard to capture them in ranking.
As others have pointed out, a solution here would be to make Siri more conversational. A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada).
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#23Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.
You'll be relieved to know the assistant in question doesn't really exist. No-one was harmed in the making of this post.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#24It’s the typical example of the meaning problem. Any token derives its meaning from a context. Think of the context as requirement of setting up a careful experiment to measure the spin of an electron. Without the context, we have reasonable confidence that it’s an electron but don’t have any clue if it’s spin up or spin down.
Similarly in this case, we’re reasonably confident that London is a place on earth with a property of time that is being asked. But without the additional context (or supplementary logic) we can’t know for sure which London it is: Canadian, American, or English.
Until we provide such context, London is in a superposition of all the possible meaningful state.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#25Okay, I knew I was stupid already, but if I was an assistant, and smart enough to know there was more than one London (which I've until recently not been), I'd have asked "Which one?" in case there was not enough context to make a guess. There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about Lon…
Asking for clarification is a GREAT response. I'd be happy if a human assistant OR Siri were to respond that way.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#26Modern ai has no “common sense”. Worse yet, no one knows what it is or how to add it. It’s why self driving cars can’t really drive, search results produce nonsense, speech recognition barely works, robots can’t do much.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#27It is amusing that someone thinking London means London, Canada should be fired for stupidity, but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) hours to his current time and needs an elaborate device to do it is seen as smart and insightful. This is some pretentious BS.
My reply to the deleted comment by dkdbejwi383
> Haha yeah you're so much smarter than him. Somebody should give you an award!
I think his post is motivated by the kind of pretentious assholery that emanates from the kind of world view, or view on other humans that the article rerflects, that assistants are objects to be fired over whatever opinion their "owner" has on what is to be considered stupid or not.
"Oh! My assistant is so STUPID they didn't think about this thing the same way as I did, they should be fired, lowlife trash!"
Yeah, first in class entitled assholery right there.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#28Okay, I knew I was stupid already, but if I was an assistant, and smart enough to know there was more than one London (which I've until recently not been), I'd have asked "Which one?" in case there was not enough context to make a guess. There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about Lon…
You're right that some people want to know the time in London, Ontario. But most people who ask the time in London don't.
In the absence of context, the right thing is to give the time in the UK. If more context is given: "What time is it in London, Ontario," then obviously it should give the time in Ontario, and perhaps remember that this person is an exception to the rule.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#29I’ve always phrased the question as “What is the time in the UK” (as a British person living in the USA). It’s unclear to me whether my form of asking the question is because it’s the best way to get a “good” answer from Siri, though I don’t think it would ever occur to me to ask what the time is in London versus the last city I lived in (Bath) in the first place, since they’re always the same.
Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK, so there's no point asking "What's the time in London" and "What's the time in Preston" because you know the answer is the same, but since America has 3 or 4 timezones (I'm not sure, I know it's at least three), American people intuitively specify the city, since "What's the time in the USA" is not valid
> Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK
And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the border of French Guyane. When you say "what time is it in France", do you mean "metropolitan France across the ocean", or do you mean "the closest French department a hundred miles away"?
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#30"you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. "
Oh, if only, John. But then, who'd write for your blog?
(if you feel that's unwarranted: "Daring Fireball" was the outlet that wrote a character assassination piece on rms, backed by some irrefutable evidence, that turned out to be about esr, and nobody performed even the most casual of fact checking, and it's still up there with some sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction, and probably all because rms told Jobs they couldn't grant him an exception to turn gcc proprietary eons ago.)