Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Siri, What Time Is It in London?

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 776 posts

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#51

Post by dustinmoris »

An actual assistant would have a lot of context. Do I know that you're going to travel to London, UK for a break next week and therefore I would naturally assume that you are interesting in the time there.

However, are you planning to visit your parents in London, Canada this weekend? Then an assistant who would still answer with the time of London, UK would maybe also not be the smartest?

So really context is everything and making broad statements that if an assistant was to answer with anything but London, UK should get fired is something that someone would say, who IMHO should get fired. shrug

Also, IMHO, if someone doesn't know that machines don't have human context and therefore doesn't know to ask their digital assistant "What is the time in London, UK" when they want to know the time in London, UK, then maybe they should get fired from their tech job. shrug

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#52

Post by Veen »

jka wrote: post #34

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".

Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#53

Post by ramblerman »

teruakohatu wrote: post #37
SirHound wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?".

Google demoed an AI that could call the barber and make an appointment for you about a year ago.

I think it shows a lack of imagination on your part to NOT make that connection.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#54

Post by globular-toast »

denster wrote: post #20

I think dates, times, UTC offsets, and locales/cultures is a topic we frequently think of as "that's easy" [1] when in practice it's painstakingly hard to get right. As an example, we've spent the past few days on our eng team refining our spreadsheet functions for date/time handling, and it's like the 5th time we've iterated on this (after supporting everything Excel / Google Sheets do). Funny part is, I'm sure we'l…

Any developer who thinks dates, times, UTC offsets and locales/cultures is "easy" is grossly incompetent (unless, of course, they've never worked with human-facing software before, in which case their naiveté can be forgiven).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#55

Post by unfunco »

smikhanov wrote: post #43
craigsmansion wrote: post #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 cas…

What are RMS and ESR?

Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#56

Post by frou_dh »

As much as the big players have been pushing it, I still have zero desire to speak out loud to any computer.

Probably going to get labelled as a mental disorder for feeling like this, in the coming decades.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#57

Post by laumars »

smikhanov wrote: post #43
craigsmansion wrote: post #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 cas…

What are RMS and ESR?

Old handles for the following individuals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#58

Post by fireattack »

dustinmoris wrote: post #51

An actual assistant would have a lot of context. Do I know that you're going to travel to London, UK for a break next week and therefore I would naturally assume that you are interesting in the time there. However, are you planning to visit your parents in London, Canada this weekend? Then an assistant who would still answer with the time of London, UK would maybe also not be the smartest? So really context is everyt…

But if none of these contexts you mentioned exist (which is the case here), what would an actual assistant answer?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#59

Post by smikhanov »

darkwater wrote: post #38
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"

Your #2 is not good. I live in London, UK and when asking "What's the time in London", I mean London, UK.

You may ask why do I need to specify London at all? Here's one of the possible scenarios, sounding very normal as human communication goes:

(I'm in London wanting to phone my relatives in Moscow, which is several time zones away. I don't know the current time in either Moscow or London, and I don't know what's the time difference between the two as not all countries observe DST)

Me: "Hey Siri, what's the time in Moscow?"

Siri: "It's 10:35PM in Moscow, Russia"

Me (thinking about whether I'll finish speaking in time for dinner): "Hey Siri, what's the time in London?"

Siri: "It's 8:35PM in London, UK"

Asking "What's the time?" instead of "What's the time in London?" sounds very unnatural here.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#60

Post by mxcrossb »

bnt wrote: post #46
DangerousPie wrote: post #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…

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.

When I lived in the United States I frequently used Siri while driving to setup the gps or change what music I was listening to. But indeed, ever since moving to a country with a nice public transportation system, I’ve had it disabled. There just isn’t a compelling use case.

Meanwhile, my iPhone has gotten much smarter about adding meetings to my calendar, or guessing the person who is calling me. These seem like the real use cases for AI going forward.

Post reply on HN