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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

daringfireball.net

41–50 of 776 posts

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#41
It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is.

Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close to "Hey Siri".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#42
post #22

Ranking 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 timez…

As others have pointed out, a solution here would be to make Siri more conversational.

But that would make it almost as smart as an Infocom game from 1981. Something, something, doesn't scale, mumble, something...

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#43

"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 cas…

What are RMS and ESR?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#45
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…

That would get annoying very soon. If you look hard enough, almost any question is ambiguous.

I think the best thing to do is to pick one interpretation, answer that, but make it clear which London you picked (“the time in London, England is 12:34”), and then, handle “no, the one in…” correctly.

Falling back to “which one do you mean?” Should be the exception, as a voice assistent that can’t make that initial guess right most of the time isn’t worth using.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#46

It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is. Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close…

I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Even the basic “call home” works every 3rd time. I try it for a few minutes with every new iOS update only to see it’s still the same dumbster fire.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#47
post #22

Ranking 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 timez…

The problem sounds a little like collaborative filtering. If you have a certain affinity with cities A,B,C, then you can compute the expected affinity with a city X by looking at the affinities other people have with X, and their affinities with A,B,C.

Instead of looking at people, you can also scrape websites to get the relations. But here you may get a recursive problem because if a website speaks of "London", you might not know in advance which London they speak of.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#48
post #31
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…

Selecting a default behaviour based on what "most people" will benefit from is great some cases, but mostly cases people will encounter only once.

People who happen to fall beside the "most" category should not have to deal with that every single time.

The right thing to do for Siri is to ask, maybe just once, which london you want to know the time for, if its not smart enough to infer it from something else it's learned about you.

Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often, and if the siri software has no other parameters tracked, then it's not unreasonable to assume that they're asking about that.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#50
post #6

It 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.

> who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 [...]

As someone who frequently talks to colleagues across timezones that are -9, -2, or +3.5 hours from me, where each of these have different dates for summer time, or don't have summer time, and meeting recurrences gets skewed etc, I don't see how asking about the current time off a location could be seen as "pretentious".

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