Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone doesn't know what AM means, they don't know English anyway.
It's Latin
It's used in English, therefore it's English.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
641–650 of 776 posts
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#642Siri 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…
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.
It could be worse. It could have said "OK".
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#643It's likely the closest 'London' near the user.
Side effect of living in former British colonies.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You probably wouldn't fire them after the first time, but do you really think someone who makes that mistake won't just be more trouble than help to work with? I've worked with some clueless people. All of which were capable of learning with some instruction and guidance. Had a cameraman once forget to press "record" at the beginning of an event - nearly costing me a client. I was pissed at the ignorance of the mist…
That's not comparable at all. People make mistakes, they forget; if I asked someone to bring me a coffee and they brought me the beans because they had a brain fart, I might laugh and be OK with it. If they consistently brought me beans and water, I'd think they were being malicious, and if they brought me beans and water, even though they know what a coffee is, and genuinely acted clueless about it, I would be serio…
>I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion at all.
The example OP provided is about how asking someone to bring you coffee can produce unexpected results. I furthered the point that it can still happen with trained and experienced baristas - people who make coffee for a living.
If someone is being obviously and intentionally malicious by doing a task incorrectly, then yeah, let them go. You'll both likely be happier for it.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#645I didn't see any New Englanders in this thread point out this sign in Maine yet [1]. I grew up in northern New Hampshire and many the towns near me were named after European places like Berlin and Milan (purposefully mispronounced after WWII). Much of the south part of the state is named after cities in England: Manchester, Dover, Portsmouth, etc. Close by is Portland, Maine, which is always confused with the one in Oregon unless you've lived there.
This is one of those AI contextual things which have no great solution until the machines can read our minds, or get a lot better at learning about us. Then, of course, privacy advocates will lose their minds.
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/China_Si...
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#646Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#647Earlier 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.
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 - representi…
If this had happened at some of the other places I have worked, the CEO would have made all the developers stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Why did no one care?
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#648There's a lot of context that goes into this question. Almost all grown-ups understand time zones at least enough to know that somewhere far away (at the other side of the equator or longitudinally) is likely to have a different time of day at any given time. On the flip side, we understand that somewhere sufficiently close, like the next town over, is at least in general unlikely to have a different time of day. So for an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) to choose between London, a few kilometres away, and London, UK, would depend on at least these factors:
- How important is either London in your life? If you commute to London, Canada, then it's going to be infuriating to always get answers about London, UK.
- Is the answer for London, Canada different from "What time is it?"? If it's the same, then there's at least a fairly good chance that you knew it was in the same time zone, and you didn't intend to ask about it.
- Asking about the time is fundamentally different from asking about a whole lot of different things. Let's say you ask for the biggest manga book shop in London, which London depends on whether you're currently near any London, whether you've been to any specific London before, whether you've got tickets to go to a conference in London, whether London near you is even big enough to have a manga book shop.
All in all, no, it's not obvious that "London" always means the globally most important London.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#649This 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…
I disagree. Should the resident of London, Ontario say it every time to a virtual assistant about the weather when it should be obvious they are interested in the place of residence? And so on, all the same context layers apply (British expat in London, Ontario, etc.)
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#650If you type "16 oz in cups" in duck duck go, it currently gives 15 imperial fl oz is 1.894 US cups. If you change it to US fl oz, it is then 1.972 US cups, when most people would expect 2.0 US cups. This is because there are US nutritional fl oz, and US customary fl oz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)#Legal_cup. This sifting through of different "oz" is highly contextual, but Google gets it right.