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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#31

Post by onion2k »

dusted wrote: post #13

Okay, 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…

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 London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one..

There will be a lot more people who are asking about the British London than people who are asking about their nearest London. Apple will be making far more people sad by defaulting to the local one. If Siri asked "Which London?" every time most people would get annoyed.

What should happen from a UX perspective is that Siri should respond with "The time in London, UK, is..." which would inform the user that Siri is differentiating between different Londons, and that they need to specify a locality in order to narrow down the query to some other London if necessary. 99% of the time the user will get what they wanted first time, and the other 1% of the time the user will be informed that their query wasn't accurate enough.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#33

Post by nivenkos »

Hamuko wrote: post #11

Same thing happens with Frankfurt. If I order something from Amazon.de, my package usually goes through Frankfurt. When I checked my package tracker app on my iPhone, I was surprised to find out that Frankfurt is actually on the Germany-Poland border. Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead…

I remember Deutsche Bahn's website used to do the same with Freiburg and Freiburg im Breisgau. Almost made that mistake once.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#34

Post by jka »

To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, UK.

Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#35

Post by Veen »

avip wrote: post #15
_jplc wrote: post #8

Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.

I'm too lazy to clarify my thoughts, you're fired.

If you have to constantly "clarify your thoughts" because your assistant is incapable of basic inferences based on context and general knowledge, then they aren't likely to be much use as an assistant.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#36

Post by gruturo »

Hamuko wrote: post #11

Same thing happens with Frankfurt. If I order something from Amazon.de, my package usually goes through Frankfurt. When I checked my package tracker app on my iPhone, I was surprised to find out that Frankfurt is actually on the Germany-Poland border. Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead…

My company (based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) had an online business travel reservation system which helpfully pre-filled the starting point of all new trips to Frankfurt, Kentucky (which is not even the right spelling of the city).

I filed a request to NOT pre-fill the starting city to a place in Kentucky and got a polite but firm reply that this was the default list provided by the 3rd party online booking engine and cannot be customized. Sigh.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#37

Post by teruakohatu »

SirHound wrote: post #16
_jplc wrote: post #8

Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.

Is it? Siri is a digital assistant. The point is it should be held to a much higher standard. It's currently awful to the point of uselessness. So what standard of assistant is it? Not one you'd employ.

I think treating Siri like a digital version of a Personal Assistant is going a bit far. It is a simple Voice Interface to a bunch of apps, local databases and cloud databases.

Nobody has ever said "Should I buy an Apple Watch for $750 or hire a PA for $35,000/year?".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#38

Post by darkwater »

dusted wrote: post #13

Okay, 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…

TBH I think there are only two cases where you would answer with London, Ontario time:

- you are from London, Ontario and are traveling in another TZ

- you are in London, UK

In all the other cases, without no further context, Londo UK should be used because it's one of the "capitals of the world"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#39

Post by chongli »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #17
jen20 wrote: post #10

I’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

What’s funny is that if I ask Siri what time it is in London, it gives me the same time as it is here in Waterloo (1hr east of London Ontario).

On the other hand, if I ask what time it is in Preston, Siri gives me the time in the UK, despite the fact that I’m only 15km away from Preston Ontario!

Now if I ask what time it is in Cambridge, it gives me the local time instead of Cambridge England. Preston Ontario is actually part of Cambridge Ontario.

So what it seems to be doing is picking the nearest place that’s well known, rather than the most well known place with that name. Preston Ontario isn’t really known at all unless you’re from this area. Cambridge Ontario is a little bit more well known, though still a far cry from Cambridge England (likely due to the university).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#40

Post by molteanu »

The fact that this piece of "news" is front page is really stupid.

There was a BBC piece yesterday about the condition in the Malakasa camp in Greece.[1] Some of our fellow brothers literally don't have anything to eat. And while it's 2020, we still fret about what browser is better (I bet half the globe doesn't even know what a browser is or doesn't care) or spend excessive amounts of time for yet a new color theme or a shiny new website that offers 2 new buttons that the other 50 websites don't.

I think we failed. We were supposed to be the smarter ones. The best income (or close), the brightest minds, the new future, AI, the internet that connects everybody (how nicely did FB solved that). And here we are, gathered around the fire, having an intelligent conversation about nothing.

https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cnx753je2q4t/europe-migrant-...

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