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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#91

Post by dustinmoris »

nixpulvis wrote: post #63
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…

ha! I was wondering how hard it'd be to find someone making an appeal to "context". While you're not exactly wrong, you are. Parsing meaning is something humans are surprisingly good at, and trained for. I think the most damning part is how, at the bottom, he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time... for now. But, his point about consistency and slowness is exactly why I neve…

> he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time...

It's only correct if that is what you secretly asked for. If I have never travelled to Europe and I am planning a trip to London, Canada then in my subjective world I would kind of be disappointed when my digital assistant told me the time of London, UK. That person would have equally zero understanding, like "WTF SIRI, why would I want to know some city somewhere I don't even know where it is located on the map when you (know) that I often go and visit Canada. Gosh you stupid idiot assistant!"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#92

Post by ArgyleSound »

dusted wrote: post #48
onion2k wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

> Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often

It really isn’t. I can see this being the case for people that live within, say, 100 miles of London, ON - but why would they want to know the time there in that case?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#95

Post by toyg »

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…

TBH, Google Assistant is not that much better. In the last few months it has become absurdly racist against my Italian accent, replying to me in Italian after I ask stuff in English - and getting the question wrong anyway.

But yes, Siri is the worst.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#96

Post by globular-toast »

teruakohatu wrote: post #71
globular-toast wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think you underestimate newbie developers. The nightmare that is dates and times is something that you learn from experience, not at university.

Yes, I should say "experienced developer".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#97

Post by jka »

enlyth wrote: post #79
jka wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep; my (indirect) point is that there are multiple possible reasons why Siri may have made the judgement that London, Ontario was more relevant when answering. My guess is that Apple would find it difficult to provide robust references to John to explain why it happened, or how they've fixed it for him (and whether that fix is a one-off workaround for his complaint, etc..)

People always expect the 'obvious' interpretation, but sometimes it's difficult to define exactly what that means for everyone. As another poster said here, context is also a very important factor.

Precisely. It's the user's context that matters, and that can change even for a particular individual at different times and locations.

Remote, proprietary personal assistants tend to apply their own (generally unknowable and unaccountable, from the user's perspective) interpretation of the context.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#98

Post by jotm »

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…

It's ridiculous how poor in functionality all of them are... The best they can do is, what? Creating schedule entries, for me. All I ask Google is the weather, time, some search when I'm lazy and translate (the voice translate app itself is great btw). Feeling like a total corporate bitch saying "Hey Google" every time, too :D

This is supposed to be a personal assistant. And I have a whole list of what it could do for me, personally. But it doesn't.

I've been trying to figure out how to hook Google's speech recognition and voice into other apps, since they're great and it's 99% of what I need, hands-free control and feedback. Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#99

Post by Hamuko »

mrshu wrote: post #81
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…

A similar thing happened with some football fans that made it to "Frankfurt (Oder)" instead of "Frankfurt am Main" for the Europa League's semifinals. Judging from the published pictures [0], it looks like Google Maps may lead to the same result as Apple Maps for "Frankfurt". [0] https://talksport.com/football/529808/benfica-fan-wrong-fran...

Searching for "Frankfurt, Germany" in Google Maps shows me Frankfurt am Main now at least. Hard to say if that's been changed at some point.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#100

Post by dustinmoris »

fireattack wrote: post #58
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?

There was minimal context, location data from the watch. Maybe even the fact that there's a pandemic and he ain't gonna go to London, UK, but possibly Canada.

However you spin it, someone will find a reason to find the answer "stupid", so the only one who is really stupid is the person who fails to ask a concrete question if they expect a concrete answer.

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