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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#521

Post by OriginalPenguin »

_ps6d wrote: post #497
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other p…

Ironically your best bet to get it fixed is almost certainly to post your real address here as part of this thread.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#522

Post by noisy_boy »

I mean I get the complications but if I'm living _that_ close to London OH, chances are that I won't be asking the time because it'll probably be same as my own timezone. If I am living multiple timezones away, then I probably want to know about London, England.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#523

Post by kilo_bravo_3 »

Siri doesn't know that my front door is called "FRONT DOOR".

I only have one smart lock, which works perfectly, and it is called "FRONT DOOR" in HomeKit.

When I ask Siri about my FRONT DOOR she responds that she cannot find it.

When I ask Siri about the status of my DOOR, she responds with "The FRONT DOOR is locked/unlocked".

I'll then say 'Alright Siri you literally just used the phrase "FRONT DOOR" five seconds ago and the text transcript on the screen says "FRONT DOOR" hey Siri is my FRONT DOOR locked'

Siri: WTF are you talking about? You don't have a FRONT DOOR.

"Hey Siri is my door locked"

Siri: Your FRONT DOOR is locked.

Google and Alexa handle things flawlessly.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#524

Post by llbeansandrice »

DenisM wrote: post #499
jvolkman wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only a zip code can span cities, a single city/zip can span multiple tax authorities e.g. parts of Redmond, WA zip code 98052 are under Regional Transit Authority and others are not. I think that pretty much any assumption we're making about strict hierarchy are bound to be broken at some point.

I worked with zip codes on a project. Zip codes are a nightmare. They cross everything. There are zip codes which cross state-lines. Zip codes which are not a single contiguous area of land. So many issues.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#525

Post by mthoms »

briandear wrote: post #481
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 “Chines…

With the utmost respect, I disagree. In my experience, the average American seems much less knowledgable about the rest of the world when compared with Western Europeans/Canadians/Australians/Kiwis.

To be fair, it's not that they are less intelligent, it seems to be because they are less exposed to, and perhaps less interested in, other cultures/countries.

A huge part of that is geographic isolation and American cultural/media "dominance".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#526

Post by [deleted] »

OriginalPenguin wrote: post #521
_ps6d wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other p…

Ironically your best bet to get it fixed is almost certainly to post your real address here as part of this thread.

[deleted]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#527

Post by Normille »

anoncake wrote: post #314
gambiting wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, if you're presenting to international audiences then either one of those two is unacceptable. First one because in a lot of countries people genuinely won't know what AM means, the other because there's only one clear way of reading it, but it's not consistent between countries.

If someone doesn't know what AM means, they don't know English anyway.

It's Latin

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#528

Post by Thlom »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #411
larrik wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They still know what it means though. Clocks are still divided into 12 in Europe.

Not if you don't have to use it for whatever reason. Personally I never learned the difference between am and pm before I got a job where I had to interact with people who used it. Still not sure if noon/midnight is 12am or 12 pm though ...

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#529

Post by chris_f »

smacktoward wrote: post #517
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 C…

I agree, this is a fairly clear cut example.

But what do you do in situations that are closer to split on people agreeing what the right answer is, or there are 10 answers that could be relevant to the same percentages of people.

A query leading to the single relevant answer to the user 100% of the time is impossible.

There could be a mechanism for the system to get additional information when needed, but that also has some user experience issues.

These are all problems that are most likely solvable to a degree though.

On a side note, I also don't think Siri is very good compared to some of the other voice assistants.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#530

Post by ngngngng »

There's a Woodland Hills in Utah and a Woodland Hills in California. If you ask Google what the weather is in Woodland Hills, it will ALWAYS give you the weather for California. Even if your current location is Woodland Hills, Utah and even if your address is set to Woodland Hills Utah in your Google account or Google home.
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