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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#511

Post by cmehdy »

jason0597 wrote: post #474
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.

>subtracting 12 in their head for PM times. Is that how you're supposed to do it? All my life I've been subtracting 2 and ignoring the fist digit for PM times (with the exception of post 20:00 times). I just noticed that when I was a kid and been using that all this time e.g. 17:00 - 2:00 = 15:00 => 5:00

It works for everything up to 22, so you'd only encounter issues in the last 2 hours of the day really

22:00 - 2:00 = 20:00 => 0:00

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#512

Post by astrea »

recursive wrote: post #308
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…

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.

So they should go completely counter to the way that businesses traditionally function and keep something in a lab for potentially decades instead of shipping a "good enough" solution that can be fixed along the way? Especially one that would get valuable information and edge cases from a live system? It's not like it's safety critical software. It's neat to have, sure, but you won't die if you get the wrong London's time.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#513

Post by quicklime »

jvm_ wrote: post #505
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…

Anyone want to guess where this sign is located? https://imgur.com/XyTJHEc

Hamilton?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#514

Post by [deleted] »

chris_f wrote: post #506

Search relevance is incredible difficult, especially when there is not enough information provided in the query and there are multiple "correct" answers. Someone is always going to be disappointed. You can make the argument in this case that +90% of users would find that London, England is a better answer, but there are millions of these types of queries. In a recent example, I was using my favorite search engine and…

[deleted]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#515

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

oh_sigh wrote: post #507
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #501

I must admit I have grown weary of appending “the country” to every Google search I make related to Georgia. Also, for a long time, searching Google for “London bridge” returned an incorrectly labelled photo of Tower Bridge as its top result. Genius.

To be fair, most people think the tower bridge is the London Bridge, not just a London bridge.

Well yes, but surely Google showing the wrong information is not helping. I can understand if the argument is that Google is trying to show what the user intended, and they had correctly surmised that the user is wrong. They do a good job of this with misspellings. Perhaps they ought to do something similar in this case too?

[user Googles ‘London bridge’]

Google: Showing results for Tower Bridge (click here to instead only show results for London Bridge).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#516

Post by ubermonkey »

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…

Oh, I absolutely agree. But I can see how that might have come in as a first-assumption that was never revised. Which, if you think about it, is probably a huge class of bugs industry-wide.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#517

Post by smacktoward »

chris_f wrote: post #506

Search relevance is incredible difficult, especially when there is not enough information provided in the query and there are multiple "correct" answers. Someone is always going to be disappointed. You can make the argument in this case that +90% of users would find that London, England is a better answer, but there are millions of these types of queries. In a recent example, I was using my favorite search engine and…

> Search relevance is incredible difficult, especially when there is not enough information provided in the query and there are multiple "correct" answers. Someone is always going to be disappointed.

Sure, but in that case you go with the answer that will be the correct answer for the most users. Which in the example in TFA would almost certainly be London in the United Kingdom, not some other London in Kentucky or Canada or what have you. You'll end up disappointing those users who actually want to know the time in those Londons, but there are going to be a lot fewer of those.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#520

Post by quicklime »

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…

Flipping this around a bit: if someone in England asked "what's the time in London?" should Siri assume that they're talking about London in Ohio or Ontario? Everyone in England is on GMT, so they don't need to do timezone conversions to London time.
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