Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Siri, What Time Is It in London?

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 776 posts

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#351

Post by ape4 »

wcarss wrote: post #275
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…

Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

Simply use the airport code YXU ;)

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#352

Post by csomar »

fiblye wrote: post #346
csomar wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I was washing the car while listening to Music with the air pods. I mistakenly clicked them and it launched Siri which for some reason it called a number on my phone through Facetime.

I always immediately disable siri because something similar happened the very first week I got my first iPhone. It seems to want to call the one person you haven't talked to in years.

Ha. Same thing for me. Made me rush to the phone as I heard the number it wanted to call.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#353

Post by JoeAltmaier »

larrik wrote: post #317
aib wrote: 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"?

I actually didn't realize am/pm wasn't something Europeans did...

Uh, they invented it. I guess they forgot.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#354

Post by mikepurvis »

nsavage wrote: post #204
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…

To be fair, where I'm from, "London" would probably refer to London, ON, but that's just because I live in Southern Ontario. So it's not like no one has heard of it. On the other hand: no one in Southern Ontario will be asking what time it is in London, ON because it's all in the same time zone, so this seems like a problem.

Well, and it's further complicated by the context of what's being asked. Coming from Waterloo Region, if I ask what time it is in London, I almost certainly mean in England. But if I ask for directions to get to London, I probably mean the one that's a few hours away by car.

So it's not as simple as just fitting these queries into generic templates and sending all instances of $LOCATION to a common geocoder.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#355

Post by epistasis »

Asooka wrote: post #344
tjpnz wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times. That's not going to get you anywhere - they're not listening.

On the bright side, screaming at the void can be therapeutic for some people...

The modern day equivalent of writing a stern letter and just leaving it in a drawer.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#356

Post by danohuiginn »

ben_w wrote: post #287
zimpenfish wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the recent (~5y) past, I've asked Google Maps, from within London, a route to Charing Cross Station and been given the one in Glasgow.

Ouch! That’s even worse than a pre-smartphone fail I encountered ~15 years ago. I was on a train from London to Liverpool Lime Street Street, and somewhere around Nottingham one of the fellow passengers asked me when it would arrive in Liverpool Street Station.

From Cambridge (UK), you can take trains either to Liverpool or to Liverpool Street Station (in London). Refugees would often be released from a nearby detention center with a ticket and instructions to take the train to Liverpool. More than one ended up lost and befuddled in Liverpool Street.

[2nd-hand story from, likewise, 15 years ago. Accuracy not guaranteed]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#357

Post by jvolkman »

At some point about a year ago I noticed that I could no longer ask my Google Home devices "what's the weather?". I'd just get a generic "I don't understand" response. But more specific queries such as "What's the weather in Seattle?" would work.

After a couple of weeks of this, I somehow got the idea that it was related to the devices' configured locations. And sure enough, telling the Home that I lived in the next city over fixed the problem.

So I started a binary search and eventually found that the issue was limited to my ~10x20 block Seattle neighborhood - basically the outline shown when I search for its name in Google Maps. I then also realized that it applied to weather queries on my phone as well, but since the phone uses GPS rather than a specific location setting, I could only reproduce the broken and working behaviors by crossing one of the neighborhood boundary streets.

Turns out it was some long-standing configuration issue with Knowledge Graph's entry for my neighborhood, and some recent code change in location-based weather queries began butting heads with it. Luckily I worked at Google at the time and was able to track down and pester people that could help fix the issue.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#358

Post by karatestomp »

mhandley wrote: post #279
tryauuum wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a joke? Year should be in the first column.

Agreed - really wish more people would use ISO date format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I think formats with month and day before year are popular (and possibly emerged originally) for cases in which the year's only really included in case you're not sure whether you're reading something old and the date's already passed, that is, the date is referring to something 12 months or less away, which is probably a very high percentage of dates people encounter day-to-day. This puts the most useful information up front. The alternative being dates that omit the year entirely, which are also very common.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#360

Post by objclxt »

bgentry wrote: post #327

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…

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

Voice assistants generally use both the text transcription and a bunch of contextual metadata as input. That metadata could include things like what's currently visible on the screen, your location, your recent queries, etc.

So even though the underlying algorithms powering the assistant may be deterministic, the input data between two seemingly identical queries could vary quite a bit.

For instance, Siri almost certainly has context around the previous questions you've asked. It would be reasonable to assume that if an assistant received two identical questions back-to-back the initial answer was wrong.

In that scenario, the assistant might decide to use the a different answer (perhaps one that had a lower ranking) in an attempt to get it right.

Post reply on HN