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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#211

Post by calineczka »

fridek wrote: post #154

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…

I would summarise it as: use separate keywords instead of sentences. "Change Light Bulb" instead of "how to change a light bulb". "Black Science Guy", "Kevin Durant height", "rails has_many api", etc...

Recently Google got much better in understanding full sentences and there are tons of SEO optimized pages for certain phrases. Nevertheless, using keywords is what I imagine advanced users do.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#212

Post by mdemare »

I have a HomePod and we're getting increasingly good at pronouncing French and Dutch artists with the accent of someone with no conception of foreign languages in order to get Siri to play them, e.g. "Gene Ferret" for Jean Ferrat.

Apple Maps will happily butcher Dutch and French streetnames to the extent that we cannot recognize them at all.

Siri will just make a random guess if it can't understand what I asked it to play. It's just so supremely awful at almost everything.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#213

Post by spuz »

Dobbs wrote: post #7

I hit this all the time with "Salt Lake City", it gives me the time in India. Despite the fact that my phone should know that I have tens of contacts in Utah, but few if any in India.

Is that with Siri or something else?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#214

Post by stuaxo »

mattlondon wrote: post #76

I 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…

It's ridiculous TBH, whether its travel apps, or setting timezones in things.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#215

Post by jen20 »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #195
chongli wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

There's also Preston, Maryland in the US - finding UK town names which are not repeated elsewhere is hard!

It also makes driving around New England most confusing, since towns which _should not_ be in the same direction often are...

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#216

Post by gambiting »

Yep, Siri is absolutely useless, I have no idea how people mention it it in the same breath as Alexa or Google Assistant(although these are also incredibly brain dead in their own ways). My favourite one with Siri was when I said "navigate to X, Birmingham" and it plotted a route(somehow??) To Birmingham, US(I live in the UK). Like, that's incredibly bad.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#217

Post by barrkel »

stuaxo wrote: post #209
nicbou wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rather inconvenient when shopping for niche products. American website assumes that everyone on the internet is American, and you have to go through the shopping cart experience to learn that they don't ship to Canada or Europe.

Almost any results from DuckDuckGo have this affliction.

Go to https://duckduckgo.com/settings and change the Region to wherever you are for better regional results.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#218

Post by nromiun »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #202
nromiun wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't doing business in just America. The issue is the communication. Some services will have big banners like "Works everywhere flawlessly" and then (if you are lucky) in some dark corner of the FAQ there will be a tiny sentence, "Only available in US for now" (translation: it will never be available anywhere else). Even global companies like Google, Amazon do this.

In situations like that non-US consumers aren’t their customers, and they’re simply not interested in communicating with them.

Then why are they on the internet? Aren't they aware that non-US people can also access it? And if they aren't interested then why do they add "for now" to their message?

And are you telling me global companies like Google and Amazon don't have any non-US customers? I don't know which world is that but I want to live in it.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#219

Post by gambiting »

aib wrote: post #177
mattlondon wrote: post #76

I 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"?

Yep, if you're presenting to international audiences then either one of those two is unacceptable. First one because in a lot of countries people genuinely won't know what AM means, the other because there's only one clear way of reading it, but it's not consistent between countries.
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