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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#321

Post by spuz »

onion2k wrote: post #31
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…

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 London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one.. There will be a lot more people who are asking about the British London than people who are asking about their nearest London. Apple will be making far more people sad by defaulting to the local…

> What should happen from a UX perspective is that Siri should respond with "The time in London, UK, is..."

This is exactly what Google assistant does. You can follow your question up with "what about London, Canada" and it will say "The time in London, ON, Canada is...".

There are two things a good assistant will do: 1. save you time by making reasonable assumptions and 2. inform you which assumptions it has made.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#322

Post by Zenst »

wickerman wrote: post #187
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…

Another irritating bit about this is that when I search for news about my country in my language, spanish (I live in London, the UK one Siri, not the american one) I still get a number of english language results first.

Did you search in spanish or english? Also local environment options - was in in english or spanish.

But the whole language and geographic association is one area in which many software experiences seem to get mixed results.

My pet gripe is when I install software and it offer English (American) and no English(UK) option. Though less impacting that some language handerlings, like yourself.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#323

Post by rhinoceraptor »

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…

I get the accidental invocations about once a day, because my dog is named Maisie and apparently that's just close enough to "Hey Siri".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#324

Post by Zenst »

Last night I asked Amazon Alexa to clap for NHS, darn thing started singing a song about science - well embarrassing when was expecting a loud clap to join in the chorus of neibours as done my wrist in and yet no, it started singing some song about science loudly and yeah, don't even want to think what my neibours thought if they heard that. Still could of been worse.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#325

Post by smellsdonkey »

Not necessarily on topic but my biggest gripe with voice assistants is that they work like a web search. You can ask what the state of the world is NOW but you can get them to let you know when things happen. I want "Alexa, let me know when XXX is having a concert nearby" or "Alexa, tell me when XX is on sale". That's what I really want.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#326

Post by ken »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #298

TBH I always feel amazed about how worked up people get about stuff like this, especially people familiar with software who should know that there are millions, maybe billions of edge cases like this in a generic knowledge system, and thus at least it's easy to make a mistake like this. I mean, the time it took him to write his blog post is probably more than all the times it would take him to follow up with "What ti…

But the post points out that Siri from other Apple devices gets it right. Apple’s “generic knowledge system” can answer this. It’s only Apple Watch which has trouble.

That’s kind of weird. It’s not that Siri is especially bad. It’s that “Siri” is something different depending on how you query it. Other online search systems aren’t like that, and integration and consistency are typically Apple’s forte.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#327

Post by bgentry »

The craziest and most confusing behavior of Siri for me is:

Sometimes you can ask a question and watch it be perfectly transcribed in real time, but then receive a nonsensical answer from it. Ask the exact same question immediately after on the same device, transcribed exactly the same way, and get the correct answer.

Where does such unpredictability come from? How can Siri transcribe the words correctly but fail to deliver the right answer?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#328

Post by Slartie »

_2d30 wrote: post #261
Slartie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

True. So substitute "living" with "currently located in". Makes the problem of correctly considering the context of that question just even more complicated ;-)

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#329

Post by jotm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157
jotm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Goog…

I'm fairly sure they could still control and monetize such a product. Kind of like Android.

Maybe there's already something like that in the works, with all the talk and investment in AI, we should be seeing some real world results...

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#330

Post by hunter2_ »

ajuc wrote: post #320
hunter2_ wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from the USA and whenever I travel to Europe (Poland, Germany, England, Scotland, etc.) I never quite grasp whether 24h is used for all purposes, or just "official" purposes (like train schedules) while casual conversation remains 12h. I wonder if the young/old divide you described is prevalent in most places. I assume some people (perhaps older people) wear analog 12h wrist watches, and wouldn't translate to 24…

When I was young (in 90s) everybody used 18 and 6 wieczorem (in the evening) interchangeably, like 50% - 50% split. Now I almost never hear "6 wieczorem" it's always 18. I think I haven't heard it used this year in Polish. Lots of people use analog clocks but they just say 18 when looking at 6.

Interesting! It sounds like maybe there are more people doing +12 mental math (reading analog clocks in 24h places) than people doing -12 mental math (Americans trying to read 24h times) even though the USA is always the "weird" one.
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