Apple should just integrate Google Assistant, it's second to none.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
591–600 of 776 posts
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#592This 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
On the side of the 403.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#593The 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…
I looked up the last screenshot I had of this. What I asked was "In 2 days remind me to call FRIEND_NAME", and Siri created a reminder that just said "call". Transcribed perfectly, wrong content in the reminder.
I tried it again right after, and the reminder said "call FRIEND_NAME".
I don't think there was any previous conversational context or anything like that. Hard to fathom how that could happen.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it unlikely that someone in that scenario would ask "What time is it in London?" rather than "What time is it in Ohio?"
I ask for the time in SF or LA all the time, rather than the time in California. Regardless, it's not hard to find cases in the same state that cross timezone boundaries. Cottonwood, AZ vs Cottonwood, AZ 86503 (on Navajo time) is an example.
SF and LA are major cities. London, OH is not.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
About once a week Siri and I have this conversation: Me: "Siri, turn off the bedroom lights." Siri: "OK. Your 6am alarm is off." For the most part Siri works for me, with the exception of the above and her insistence on adding "ginger ale" to my grocery list as two items. /Native English speaker, specifically trained in non-regional diction because I used to work on-air in radio.
That conversation sounds like Siri thinks you're about to go to sleep and wants to make sure you remember to enable your wake-up alarm.
No, that’s what Siri says when it disables your alarm lol.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#596At 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.
Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, for not very long in the early 2000s. Yahoo had a consumer product called My Yahoo, a customisable home page with various feeds in it, and at the time they also had a My Yahoo Enterprise Edition, which they tried to sell to companies to serve as an intranet home page. I worked (in a junior sort of way) on the European deployments of MYEE.
Anyway, one of our customers - representing a company in Germany I think - filed a bug report that said something like "Weather module hasn't updated since January". They'd been going to their fancy intranet home page and seeing the same weather for months at a time.
And this bug report just sat there. For a mixture of technical and political reasons, there seemed to be nobody in the European office able to pick up this report and do anything meaningful with it. We knew about it, we knew that what we were serving to paying customers was hopeless, but we somehow couldn't get our hooks into the right point in the Weather feed to figure out where it was going wrong. Or, collectively, we didn't care enough.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#597The fact that there isn't a feedback mechanism to let the Siri team know that it responded incorrectly tells me everything I need to know. Until they have real metrics around how often Siri fails they will continue to think that their correct response rate is great.
Companies usually hire editors to manually annotate the quality of the algorithms on anonymized samples. They don't need direct user feedback to gather quality metrics. You also can't tell which step failed in the pipeline: speech recognition, query understanding, or the actual search.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#598This 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
Try this sign pointing to Mecca
https://thesearchforbeauty.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/img_0...
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#599Earlier 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…
My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now
I recently moved, and found out that virtually every single web site from my credit cards to my bank to the library uses Google to verify address entry on the fly. The problem is that Google's database entry for my address is wrong. So any time I try to enter the address "123 Oak Street, Apartment Q" Google unhelpfully corrects it on the fly to "Oak Street, Suite 1." No amount of keyboard jockeying can override Google's on-the-fly autocorrection.
The solution I eventually came up with was to turn off javascript, then enter my correct address, then turn javascript back on to finish the rest of the form.
Of course, there's no way to contact Google about its error. Maybe in Google Maps? I dunno. How do you find an address that Google Maps doesn't know to tell it that the address it has is wrong?
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#600Siri 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…
Not in my experience. This is how 80% of my Google Assistant conversations go: Me: "Hey Google, play Nine Inch Nails, you know, the one in my Google Play library" Google: "OK, playing Nine Inch Snails, a band nobody on Earth has heard of and is definitely not in your library!" Me: (Repeat a few times, trying all kinds of accents, eventually I get tired of songs about nine inch somethings , and I pull the car over and…
And what bugs me the most about the Google Play Music Library is that it won't sync up with the YouTube Music Library... They have two different music services which I can use with one subscription but I can't have some of the songs on both of them or have one single library.