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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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221–230 of 776 posts

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#221
post #179
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not just that it is wrong, nor that it doesn't have enough personal information, but that it lacks proper personalisation and the ability to learn. You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household. "Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perfor…

Siri indeed never learns. I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri. I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.

It activated when I greeted my cat. My cat is called "Timmie"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#222
Siri is also absolutely unusable if you use more than one language on a daily basis.

Or if you have a lot of contacs with non-English names. Siri never gets this right and you always have to reverse-engineer a 'fake' English pronounciation of the said name.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#223
post #194
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#224

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…

Don't forget the "world series" for major league baseball played in the US and Canada. ;-)

World in this context refers to the New York World newspaper.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#225
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

17:00 is unambiguous. 9:00 could be AM or PM. 09:00 nearly always means 24H format; but what about 11:00?

Siri should just start using "Zulu" time. /s

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#226
post #177

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"?

The best are that have a settings page where they try to give an example. But use a day-of-month =< 12. Like your example. It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#227
post #166
post #120

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#228

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.

This isn't true for either Apple or Google or Facebook, all of which are determinedly global in their sales and marketing.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#229
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

I think almost everybody in European countries knows about AM/PM, but I certainly get confused by 11:59 AM vs 12:00 AM

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#230
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

I don't intuitively know 17:00 is afternoon. I have to think about it. You get used to what you grow up with.
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