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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#651

Post by rconti »

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

in the US, based on the sign style and the road striping, and the drainage grate

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#652

Post by recursive »

mulmen wrote: post #635
Slartie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

That's a harder question. The important question here is "does your state have more than one time zone?"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#653

Post by rm445 »

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…

All these speech assistants are almost stateless, aren't they? I mean, they can ask you questions and go into a listen-for-an-answer state, but, at least last time I tried, you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on.

It's quite interesting to hear very small children talk to voice assistants. Probably not surprising, but it seems like in normally-learnt human communication you expect your conversational partner to remember the context of what you were saying, and carefully forming canned commands is a separate learned skill. It suggests these voice assistants have still got a way to go, and it seems more like a paradigm change, a big leap, than just incremental improvements.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#655

Post by rconti »

emiliosic wrote: post #643

It's likely the closest 'London' near the user. Side effect of living in former British colonies.

Siri gets it right for me, even though I am probably 6000 miles from London, England.

Maybe it's because I am not near enough to another London for the algorithm to make the assumption that I am talking about a "local London" and instead figures since they're all pretty far away, I probably mean the more well-known London.

Or maybe because I've traveled to London England but not any other Londons (That I can remember)

Or possibly because I have London, England in my World Time app.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#656

Post by sbarre »

l0b0 wrote: post #648

There'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…

Even us folks who live in Ontario refer to London in Canada as "London Ontario" when talking about it, unless it's extremely contextually obvious that you _don't_ mean London, UK.

So yes, it is obvious to us humans who have London Ontario in our lives that "London" refers to London UK.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#657

Post by schrodinger »

mojuba wrote: post #649
bradleybuda wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

If they were somehow calling a global hotline that could answer arbitrary questions for free, then yes, I suspect someone in Ontario would still clarify. If it was a local hotline, maybe not.

Which is Siri?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#658

Post by giancarlostoro »

rm445 wrote: post #653
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…

All these speech assistants are almost stateless, aren't they? I mean, they can ask you questions and go into a listen-for-an-answer state, but, at least last time I tried, you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on. It's quite interesting t…

> you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on.

Which is why I have no confidence calling it AI if its not even intelligent. Its just voice recognition on preprogrammed operations.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#659

Post by giarc »

killion wrote: post #538

The 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.

They likely don't need the manual feedback as they would be able to tell that someone asked the same question twice in a row, and then look at the data to see what the issue was.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#660

Post by schrodinger »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #495
mojuba wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously virtual assistants should ask for clarifications. Now imagine every time you ask for the time, weather or a flight to London and you always mean only London UK, imagine how annoying that can be. Makes me wonder if VA's are more productive in such cases compared to typing.

"The time in London, England, is 8:23pm." "No, I meant the time in London, Ontario" "Sure. The time in London, Ontario, is 3:23pm." You start by doing a best guess, and actually listening for a correction. For other kinds of requests, you reply with a best guess and ask for confirmation or for clarifying questions. Hard, yes. Not impossible.

I mentioned in another comment that with Siri, this exchange does work:

“What time is it in London?”

... gives answer for London Ontario

“No, London England”

... gives answer for England

However there’s no memory to this; the same thing happens next time you ask.

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