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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#481

Post by briandear »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #395
Beldin wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US. Sure. > There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. 1. Same is true for most people in the world 2. Wait, you mean they don't know if 17:00 is early morning or late afternoon?? Seriously, I have a hard time to believe that. I'll believe that most Americans need to convert to am/pm, but not that "huge swaths"…

> My expectations of the average USA'ian are better than that. Have you looked at the news lately? Seen any of Jimmy Kimmel's "man on the street" interviews? Most people will know this is sometime in the afternoon, but honestly a large portion of the population would probably think this is 7PM.

If you did a “man on the street” interview in Tokyo, how many people there would know that Texans don’t ride to their oil rig job on horses? I lived in East Asia for many years and many people there assumed that I had a ranch and rode horses because I was from Texas.

“Men” on the street everywhere have their ignorances. Americans aren’t any smarter or dumber than people anywhere else. If we were talking about “Chinese people __” or “Nigerian people __” we’d complain about it being racist or stereotypical, yet we seem to have no problem casting stereotypes when the subject is American. Europeans especially seem to delight in it. There is this smug superiority that comes in these conversations. But start lifting rocks in European towns and you’ll find that people are equally smart and ignorant across the world. It’s a matter of perspective.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#482

Post by screye »

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…

It is THE area people have been working on in AI.

Multi-hop reasoning models have started working surprisingly well. ie. reasoning over multiple levels and conditions.

Common sense reasoning is also getting a lot better. By having huge knowledge bases, the model can actually learn some degree of human like general purpose context. Such as, returning the time at the London which has the most similarity with the user's hidden representation.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#483

Post by briandear »

AnssiH wrote: post #380
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…

That probably indeed varies a lot by location and demographic. In my experience in Finland, casual spoken discussion is usually 12h but written is 24h. The xx:xx format always means 24h, whether written or spoken. When referring to a precise minute 24h is common even when spoken - "train leaves at sixteen thirty-four" - the 12h alternative is "train leaves at four past half five" or "twenty-six to five". Notably, one…

> In my experience in Finland, casual spoken discussion is usually 12h but written is 24h. The xx:xx format always means 24h, whether written or spoken.

My exact experience in France as well. “Six heure du matin” for example.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#485

Post by markkat »

The mistake Gruber is making here is that DDG, Google, Alexa, and Bing did not "get it right". Their answer wasn't wrong, but it's not because they "got it". They never "got it" any more than Siri didn't.

AI is a story we tell ourselves.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#486

Post by jvolkman »

lowdose wrote: post #448
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?

IIRC it had something to do with the parent hierarchy of my neighborhood. It was parented by both a postal code and a city, or something. I'm probably making that up, but I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to create and maintain abstractions for every possible geographic situation.

I wasn't aware of any other occurrences.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#487

Post by parliament32 »

markkat wrote: post #485

The mistake Gruber is making here is that DDG, Google, Alexa, and Bing did not "get it right". Their answer wasn't wrong, but it's not because they "got it". They never "got it" any more than Siri didn't. AI is a story we tell ourselves.

Of course they "got it". When any human says a context-less "London", except maybe people literally in London ON and surrounding areas, they obviously mean the London. It's a little human communication nuance but understanding "what I mean" vs bare "what I say" is a huge part of getting AI-ish assistants to be useful.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#488

Post by snowwrestler »

Jedd wrote: post #306
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. And even for the Americans that do know, virtually all of them (unless they are in the military or another profession that commonly uses 24h time), will have to "translate" by subtracting 12 in their head for PM times. 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.

The demographic you're referring to - North Americans within the USA who don't know how 24-hour time works - are < 2% of the world's population.

True but the GP asked about "literally everyone in the world" and the parent is a correct and useful answer to that question.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#489

Post by jordanpg »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #402
recursive wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it's hard to implement right doesen't mean Apple should get a pass. I mean, they aren't forced to create a voice assistant by regulation. If they can't make a good one, (and this applies to Amazon and Microsoft too) they should have just left it in the lab until they can.

> they should have just left it in the lab until they can. Totally disagree, because the only way these assistants get better is with real-world usage (which is why I can definitely agree that one should wonder why Apple isn't improving as fast as the competition). It was only a couple years ago that using Google Assistant was an extremely frustrating experience. I'd say it got about 5-10% of my words wrong, which me…

It is still an extremely frustrating experience. All of them: Google, Amazon, Apple. That it gets it wrong, ever, is too much for me. The first time I ever had to repeat myself getting directions on the road I was done.

I don't understand why anyone other than hobbyists can stand to use these things. They are so obviously years away from ready for serious use, and the novelty value wore off years ago.

Not shitposting here, these are serious comments about absurdly bad UX.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#490

Post by thebouv »

Siri is terrible.

"Call mom" sometimes calls my mom, who is in my favorites (I have 4 people in favorites: mom, wife, daughter, brother).

Sometimes it decides to call "wife's mom"

Sometimes it says "which mom" then lists "mom, wife's mom"

Mom, literally the word mom, is in my favorites. I use it almost daily.

And yet, Siri doesn't remember this, doesn't create relevancy, it doesn't even decide "Let's look at Favorites first".

:/

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