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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#151

Post by djaouen »

t-shaped wrote: post #127
mojuba wrote: post #75

This example illustrates how difficult AGI is and how far we are from it. We, humans, tend to take advantage of the context to make communication simpler and shorter. Just think about all the implications of this one simple question: what time is it in London? Or e.g. how can I get from London to Dublin? If the person asking the question lives in Ohio, they may actually be talking about London OH (or Dublin OH). Some…

All of these situations are fairly complicated. So the best thing to do ( even for a human assistant ) is to ask more questions. That is the best way to get clarification rather than just trying to figure out what the context is. The assistant should be able to ask a simple question: "Are you talking about the London in UK or Ohio?"

The problem is, for some subset of people, the question is ambiguous. Thus we can reduce the problem to finding that subset and asking additional questions only in those cases.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#152

Post by ninkendo »

Someone wrote: post #45
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…

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 r…

> I think the best thing to do is to pick one interpretation, answer that, but make it clear which London you picked

That’s actually the exact interaction you get with Siri today (I just checked):

U: What time is it in London?

S: It’s 7:09 AM in London, Canada

U: No, London UK

S: It’s 12:09 PM in London, England

The only problem is she doesn’t really learn this for subsequent requests, although that is a different problem IMO.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#153

Post by vidarh »

ninkendo wrote: post #122
lqet wrote: 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…

> 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). IMO I would be very disappointed if Siri started asking clarifying questions at a significantly higher rate. Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her. I’d r…

Alexa responds to "wrong", and many variations of that, with cancelling the previous action and thanking you for the feedback.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#154

Post by fridek »

I now have most of my adult years learning how to construct a phrase that gets the right results for Google, and later Assistant. It got to the point where I'm certain it must be a headache for whatever team is trying to support natural language processing in these - all proficient users ask for some artificial gibberish and get where they want to be.

Here comes my favourite brain freeze moment - recently my parents asked me to explain this to them. How do you construct a good search phrase? My brain blanked. I HAVE NO IDEA. It seems I have learned fluent Goonglish without noticing, and now can't explain the grammar or vocabulary of it.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#155

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jotm wrote: post #98
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 fo…

I agree, some things are just astonishingly bad given the immense effort and resources that are being put into machine learning.

Microsoft OneDrive tags my photos. It's mostly useless. For instance, I have some pictures of squirrels on the tree outside my window. Squirrels can really do the most amazing things on trees, but they are small compared to the tree.

Microsoft with all its AI muscle will invariably tag those images as something like #Outdoor #Grass #Plant #Tree.

It's the same problem with all of those benchmark beating AIs. They have no clue what's special about the picture and what just happens to be in them as well.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#156

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

jotm wrote: post #98
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 fo…

> Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.

Like they would ever do that. Then you would no longer be their "corporate bitch".

Seriously, the one thing that stands between home assistants and being useful is opening the software up and letting it be used by regular OSS devs. Alas, every one of the four big providers (Apple, Google, MS and Amazon) treat them as their moat; they want control over the ecosystem. It's the same in many other places in the industry - we're technologically way behind where we could be, because everyone wants to be the platform and commoditize everyone else, which necessitates having total control.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#158

Post by throwaway744678 »

erikbye wrote: post #84
ksec wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add. And neither do I know if said country, region or city is having whatever DayLight Saving hours etc.

> The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add You know, how about you learn it? Once. Instead of asking Siri or Google every time. In other words, learn to fish.

There are a lot of cities in the world, though.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#159

Post by TorKlingberg »

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.

It's fairly established that picking a capital / large city is the correct way to specify a time zone, that usually gives you what you want. The alternatives have various problems:

* Pick a country: Some counties have multiple time zones.

* Abbreviations like EST, CET: Not right in summer.

* Words like "Eastern Time": assumes the country from context.

* Offsets like UTC-5: Doesn't follow summer time.

* Click on a map: India will ban your app because one pixel in Kashmir gave Pakistan time.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#160

Post by Sharlin »

irishsultan wrote: post #104
qayxc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the absence of context, the best answer is London, UK. You actually need to imagine additional context to make any other answer plausible. If you hear the sound of hooves clip-clopping nearby, you think horses, not zebras.

In the absence of context there is no best answer. You need context to know why London, UK is much more likely to be the right London "without additional context".

In game-theoretic terms, London, England is the Schelling point [1] of the set of places named London on Earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

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