Try Googling for "Liverpool". It's a major UK cities with a metropolitan area of 2.2 million. Yet Google only gives you answers about the Liverpool football club.
Same for Manchester, made doubly difficult by City.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
191–200 of 776 posts
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#192This 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…
Exactly. And what about if I initially DO specify it's London Ontario that I'm interested in but five minutes later I ask again, referring to it simply as "London".. shouldn't a "better Siri" come back with 'assuming you still mean London Ontario, it's...' ?
I think it's possible that general acceptance of these non-AI gimmicks being referred to as "AI" will end up pushing genuine progress in true AI further into the future.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the bor…
>> And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I think the UK only consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK has some control over aspects of the dependencies but they are not actually part of the UK.
Yeah, the crown dependencies are distinct sovereign states.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#194I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing. It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million. I've always just…
Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/05/2020"?
Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 actu…
Ha, what's funny about that is I picked Preston as a random town in the UK that I thought probably doesn't have a name-twin somewhere else!
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17). My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.
So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.
No, I don't think so. There are multiple aspects.
I develop on this thing. It is running a great Unix os. I can't stand desktop Linux. The hardware quality was the best with a wide margin before the latest gen. Battery life is also great. I like them for development work when they are stable.
A lot of people are also really invested into the ecosystem. My entire photo collection is on iCloud. I use an iPhone. I can copy paste between my computer and phone. My Apple watch unlocks the computer when I'm near... List goes on.
But now I feel like Apple is a fantastic phone company that also happens to make some computers. They have been degrading pretty bad.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#197I’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…
> * Words like "Eastern Time": assumes the country from context.
This is a big bug bear of mine that seems to come up a LOT from Americans online. Eastern fucking what? Australia? Anglia?
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
A tired quip that doesn't get more clever with time. Guess what? The "World Cup" didn't invite any soccer teams from Africa or Asia to their 1930 tournament but they still called it a World Cup. The UK wasn't even part of FIFA at the time but they still pretended it was a "world cup".
The baseball World Series has been contested since 1903. When are they going to invite the rest of the world?
Whenever they join MLB, just like you have to join FIFA to be in the World Cup.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#199Apple really isn‘t on track regarding many important trends and even in areas they used to rock.
- Virtual Assistants: After almost nine years of development, Siri still is only really reliable doing most basic tasks like setting timers or reminders.(1)
- Smart Speakers: The HomePod is way too expensive and still the whole package really is no match for Amazons or Googles alternatives. Too inflexible and the "Smart" part is laughable (see above). While Amazons and Googles smart speakers are a common sight in many households today, Apple is sitting on the sideline for years.
- Laptops: The debacle around their Butterfly Keyboard design was only resolved recently … after almost four years of massive problems. The new 2020 MacBook Air has a thermal design that is weird, to say the least and according to reviewers has heat problems despite being cooled actively, when comparable laptops are cooled passively.(2) The 2020 MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro 13" have screen-to-body ratios that are outdated in comparison with the competition.(3) The MacBook Pro 16" has speaker issues, display issues(4) and may overheat when used with an external display(5).
- Desktop Computers: The Mac minis hardware is outdated and its price really isn't compelling. If you want to buy a proper external display from Apple to use with your MacBook or Mac desktop (mini/pro) and are no Hollywood Studio Video editor that needs a 5000$ XHDR display, you are out of luck. If you want to do Machine Learning and the likes on your new Mac and need NVidia CUDA support, you are out of luck.(6) The whole "modern CPU with macOS" topic is a sad one.
- Webbrowser: When surfing the web with Safari you will encounter a rising number of websites that tell you to upgrade to a more modern browser like Chrome. Many web developers will tell you that "Safari is the new IE".(7)
- TV: Apple TV pricing is not competitive and the Siri remote is so bad that people buy 3rd party replacement remotes.(8)
1) https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/alexa-vs-google-assistant-vs-...
2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2020/04/18/does-...
3) https://www.ultrabookreview.com/21772-laptops-small-thin-bez...
4) https://www.laptopmag.com/news/uh-oh-apples-16-inch-macbook-...
5) https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/16-macbook-pro-gets-excessi...
6) https://gizmodo.com/apple-and-nvidia-are-over-1840015246
7) https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com
8) https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/12/9/21002605/a...
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you sure it's due to your accent? That seems like a difficult feature to even implement. I know Google loves to play language shenanigans based on your current IP address.
Mine will sometimes parse English, sometimes German. Sometimes it will understand English, and answer in German. It's a total crapshoot.