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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#441

Post by grahamel »

danohuiginn wrote: post #356
ben_w wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

had similar encounters with people asking how much longer it will take to get to Ashford as their Eurostar train leaves soon while on a train that stops at Ashford (Middlesex) instead of Ashford International, in Kent

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#442

Post by mark-r »

smiley1437 wrote: post #309
drivers99 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a subreddit for that too. https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/

There’s also an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/1179/ (Because there’s an xkcd for pretty much everything)

I LOVE the hover text on that one.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#443

Post by OkGoDoIt »

jvolkman wrote: post #357

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…

But if you had not worked at Google at the time, there’s basically zero chance you could’ve got anyone at the company to do anything about it.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#444

Post by koala_man »

mcherm wrote: post #25
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…

Asking for clarification is a GREAT response. I'd be happy if a human assistant OR Siri were to respond that way.

It sounds like a good idea until you realize how many interpretations any given question can have, and how many of them are extremely unlikely.

"How far is Jupiter from the sun?" "Jupiter, Florida; or Jupiter the planet?"

"How old is Donald Trump?" "There are 21 people with that name, do you mean ...?"

"Call 911" "The emergency number or the English 90s boy band?"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#445

Post by DrJokepu »

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

Just use your imagination a bit.

Maybe I live in state X at location Y while my parents live at location Z in the same state, about 250 miles away from me, maybe there’s a serious storm where I live and I wonder if I need to check on my elderly parents?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#446

Post by kshacker »

mzzter wrote: post #424
evanelias wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes these systems just make baffling decisions. One time years ago, while waiting for my plane to begin deboarding at JFK Airport in NYC, I tried setting my MacBook's timezone to Eastern manually. I started typing "New Y" into the Closest City field. OS X helpfully auto-completed it as "New Yekeba, Liberia": https://evan.tumblr.com/image/65341168142 As best I can tell, New Yekeba is a tiny resettled former mini…

Looks like the autocomplete is going off alphabetical order rather than some other characteristic of the city?

I guess that's the next innovation. In the old days, you enter the entire search string. Then you got Google Suggest where each keystroke was trapped and responded to. Now not only you need to trap each keystroke, you need a weighted list of results so you show them in the order of popularity.

Not an Edit: I am pretty sure Google is already doing it so it is not an innovation, its been there for a while. I am calling it so for the folks who are not doing it. Also, it may be there in general search but it may have seemed like excessive data for searching time zones on your phone. But with billions of phone users, such usage would be common and the feature will happen, eventually.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#447

Post by jvolkman »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #443
jvolkman wrote: post #357

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…

But if you had not worked at Google at the time, there’s basically zero chance you could’ve got anyone at the company to do anything about it.

Yes. In this instance you're probably correct.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#448

Post by lowdose »

jvolkman wrote: post #357

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…

For your neighborhood or was this a more structural problem and did your collegeas find more locations with similar issues?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#450

Post by netsharc »

gmac wrote: post #410
ubermonkey wrote: post #304

Interesting. I can see how the basic algorithm might go "I've been asked for the time (or temp or whatever) in cityname. Citynames are routinely reused globally; what is the closest such cityname?" But that fails completely when you get to names like London (or Paris or Moscow or Cairo). But it happens with people, too. I'm from Mississippi, though I haven't lived there since I left for college. I now live in Houston…

It just feels like what is the closest such city name is pretty obviously an insufficient test. To approximate what a human would do, one would presumably want to start by ranking places on a range of dimensions: * nearest * biggest (or maybe size category: big city, city, town, village) * how many times user has asked about this place before * how recently user last asked about this place * ... If most/all these ran…

I wonder if there are Chinese cities with names close to major world cities. Paris has 2.15m people, its metropolitan area has 12.x million. A medium sized city im China has more than that. If by coincidence it's also named Paris, getting that as the search result would be annoying.
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