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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#261

Post by _2d30 »

Slartie wrote: post #117
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…

> If the person asking the question lives in Ohio, they may actually be talking about London OH (or Dublin OH). I would seriously doubt this assumption. Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state? On the contrary, this context information would make it much more likely that the person actually meant "London, England". Except if ther…

> Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state?

Who said they were in that state when asking? People travel.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#262

Post by lebuffon »

mc32 wrote: post #250
criddell wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been able to keep 12 AM vs 12 PM straight in my head. If I have to put something on my calendar or set an alarm for that time, I always use 11:59 AM or PM. Is there a mnemonic or trick for remembering?

Yes, you can’t have 12:01AM being in the afternoon, so 12:00AM must be one minute before 12:01AM, so it is also dark.

It might go back to Anglo-Norman (Frenchish) language:

Apres midi Post midi

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#263

Post by lebuffon »

ensiferum wrote: post #141
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…

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

It was the World Series long before Canada was involved. :-)

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#264

Post by wtmt »

Siri is still bad (and perhaps indisputably the worst assistant), but the competition in other similar areas, where text is typed, don’t seem to be any better. When I’m on a browser and go to Bing or Google, they try to guess my location from the IP address and show news from/around the location. Move to maps, and suddenly it’s like using a product from a totally different company that wants to avoid using IP address for geolocation (maybe because someone didn’t like it for some other purpose). Start typing a street name and the autocomplete list would above a bunch of places in the US (it’s almost always the US) until I finish typing the city name (and sometimes the state or country too). Goes to show how poorly these services are designed.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#265

Post by knolan »

Siri is particularly dumb in this regard. Even something as simple as ‘play again’ will not always simply repeat a track. The inconsistency is infuriating.

There are many more examples. Apple demoed the ability to ask for songs by asking Siri to ‘play that song from Top Gun’, which doesn’t work anymore.

On a somewhat related note, DuckDuckGo can be particularly bad at local search. I live in Ireland and country search is simply broken returning Australian sites over Irish sites. I have to qualify every search with Ireland or Dublin to get it to be anyway useful.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#266

Post by greggyb »

gambiting wrote: post #223
Kye wrote: 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?

In the US, I have definitely met people who will profess not being able to understand military time (this is a common way to refer to 24-hour time). They would recognize it as a time, but not get any other context from it.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#267

Post by hprotagonist »

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"?

it’s

  %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z
as God intended!

(and i’m an american!)

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#268

Post by trashtester »

I'm not surprised that Siri gets things like this wrong, unlike every traditional search engine. Each text based search engine returns more than one possible response, and if they return the wrong answer first, they can monitor how often people click on other answers, and use that to continously train their engine. Apple does not have that source of training data.

However, the fact that so many people here defend the result due to "context" is a bit interesting. I would think that from both a technical and business point of view it should be clear what that there is only one correct result of the query given. I would be surprised if more than 5% of people making the query world wide (or in the US for that matter) wide would be interested in anything but the time in London, UK.

Is there some kind of Stockholm syndrome involved?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#269

Post by fredsted »

zeristor wrote: post #136
Veen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).

Just to make things a bit more complicated London has two cities. The City of London, and the City of Westminster, which is also a borough of London. Two cities in one City; it shouldn't be allowed.

It's time to refactor London.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#270

Post by incompatible »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #198
brigandish wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do they even accept applications? The FIFA application process is apparently not very easy, but 211 national associations have still managed to join.
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