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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#631

Post by scrozier »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #584

Once I had a new assistant and I asked her to book me a flight to Boston. She went to the travel booking system, typed in Boston, then called me back confused. "Which Boston do you want? There are 8 of them?" I was caught off guard and told her I'd prefer the one in Massachusetts. I did not fire her. She was young, had a poor general education, and had never traveled outside her home state. Those things do not make h…

Thanks for this. The tone of this article was off-putting to me. The world doesn't really break down into "us" and "stupid people."

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#633

Post by cachvico »

0zymandiass wrote: post #533
kilo_bravo_3 wrote: post #523

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…

I don't know if it works there, but siri couldn't understand one of my contacts names When it read back super incorrectly from an alias, I said something to the effect of "could you pronounce that correctly?" and it asked me to say it Since then, it's understood that person's name. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It really needs to expose the option to train those easily

There is a "Pronunciation" field in the contact where you can spell out how a name is pronounced.

This article clears everything up, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8116586

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#634

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

trashtester wrote: post #268

I'm not surprised that Siri gets things like this wrong, unlike every traditional search engine. Each text based search engine returns more than one possible response, and if they return the wrong answer first, they can monitor how often people click on other answers, and use that to continously train their engine. Apple does not have that source of training data. However, the fact that so many people here defend the…

> I'm not surprised that Siri gets things like this wrong, unlike every traditional search engine. Each text based search engine returns more than one possible response, and if they return the wrong answer first, they can monitor how often people click on other answers, and use that to continously train their engine. Apple does not have that source of training data.

Amazon doesn't have that either. Google Assistant is the best when it comes to answering questions

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#635

Post by mulmen »

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 should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state?

Because they want to know what time it is in a different location.

14 states have more than one time zone. Do you know which ones?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#636

Post by casefields »

fridek wrote: post #154

I now have most of my adult years learning how to construct a phrase that gets the right results for Google, and later Assistant. It got to the point where I'm certain it must be a headache for whatever team is trying to support natural language processing in these - all proficient users ask for some artificial gibberish and get where they want to be. Here comes my favourite brain freeze moment - recently my parents…

That's definitely what people were referring to when they had good googlefu abilities. It was always odd to me when people would have trouble finding stuff and come to me for help. I somehow picked up that language to search effectively while growing up during search engines infancy.

It's weird that it feels like my tried and true abilities are getting worse. Or Googles algorithm is hurting some of us that became very proficient in very specific ways.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#637

Post by casefields »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #584

Once I had a new assistant and I asked her to book me a flight to Boston. She went to the travel booking system, typed in Boston, then called me back confused. "Which Boston do you want? There are 8 of them?" I was caught off guard and told her I'd prefer the one in Massachusetts. I did not fire her. She was young, had a poor general education, and had never traveled outside her home state. Those things do not make h…

If she were still doing that a decade later what would your response be?

We choose to hire Siri/Alexa/etc. At some point there's to be a baseline of good enough or else you fire them.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#638

Post by bradleybuda »

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…

There's a higher-order set of contexts as well. Everyone in the conversation (the asker and the answerer) knows that "London" likely means "London, UK" - that's the Bayesian default. So the if the asker wants to inquire about London, Ontario (and they are not continuing a previous conversation about London, Ontario), they are very likely to be explicit in their ask: "What's the time in London, Ontario?"

The asker has a mental model of the answerer's default contexts, and if their question is likely to be ambiguous in those default contexts, they are more likely to be explicit in their ask. The converse is also true - if the asker is not explicit about which London, that's actually a signal to the answerer to lean even harder on default contexts and best guesses.

Humans do this without even thinking because though culture and conversation we are quick to arrive at shared mental models and lean on shorthands "in the other person's head". AI not only doesn't have it's own context, it doesn't have an estimate of it's user's context and where the two might differ.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#640

Post by saagarjha »

Gatsky wrote: post #242
DangerousPie wrote: post #41

It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is. Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close…

It isn’t really ridiculous. The number of people that buy an iphone because of Siri could share a pizza.

Back when Siri was new and I was much younger this was something I really wanted…
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