Of course news travels fast. Someone on the Siri team fixed it.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
761–770 of 776 posts
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#762Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was having problems with a phone service where I needed to "press 1 to continue," but it wasn't registering. Eventually I ended up pressing 112, and my iPhone displayed "Calling emergency services," even though it's an American phone in America. I know some countries use 112, but that's too many edge cases colliding.
In fairness here, 112 is an international standard (I think it's in the GSM spec?) and is expected to work in the US.
I guess that makes sense. But it doesn't explain why the iPhone intercepted those digits when I was punching into a phone menu system.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#763My iPhone give me the right answer - London, England. Not sure why he got a different answer. And I’m in Texas about 120 miles away from London, Texas.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#764Earlier 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…
Flipping this around a bit: if someone in England asked "what's the time in London?" should Siri assume that they're talking about London in Ohio or Ontario? Everyone in England is on GMT, so they don't need to do timezone conversions to London time.
There's an extremely long-standing convention of referring to timezones by the major or capital city within that timezone, so Siri should of course assume that they're talking about London in England. In fact, this is probably more or less the correct, canonical way to ask this - asking about GMT would not give you the correct answer, since England is currently on BST which is GMT+1. Needless to say, this argument would not apply to asking about anything else about London. Context is complicated.
For similar reasons, anyone who asks for the time in Boston probably means Eastern Time regardless of how far they are from Lincolnshire, though I think the more usual and canonical way of referring to that is New York time.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and it gave you a dictionary response of "weather" as an answer? Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". "What is the weather report for today/this week?" is a more accurate question, despite an annoying amount of verbosity. But answers are still given relatively. "Cloudy" could be an accurate answer, for now . But it will be "Sunny" this aftern…
> What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and ... with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". Now that you mention it, I find it strange that voice assistants don't give natural responses when they encounter an error. It would make them seem more real, and it would be less frustrating. When you ask a human what the weather is and they tell you to look outside, you don't try to rephrase the q…
Put another way, joking or snarky responses from a human aren't just jokes, they're a form of social communication. If voice assistants used those forms without intending to communicate the same thing, that would just be frustrating in a different way.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#766Earlier 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…
I would suggest navigating to your home in maps and end up on the wrong address. When it asks for your feedback (nowadays it usually asks for it based on where you live), give it the lowest rating (the frowning smiley). In some regions, it will take you to another page asking you to write in detail what happened. Mention your story in there, hopefully, someone looking at bug reports will read through it.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#767Siri 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's nice to see that using siri is a normal thing to do :) People at work make fun of me for using it.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#768If Apple is going to be a services company, they need to make their services actually good.
Could you imagine if their hardware was as bad as Siri? We’d never accept it.
I wonder if the core Siri tech is just long in the tooth, but Apple is so pot committed to it, they can’t change it without a full rewrite.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you only allowed to affiliate your Apple ID with one country’s app store? If I moved to Japan and switched to the Japanese app store would I just lose all of the apps I purchased via the US store?
Yes, you can only have your account associated with 1 store. You won't lose the apps you have installed but 1. They won't update until you switch back so you'll likely need to switch 2 to 4 times a year as your bank and/or other services deprecates their old apps. 2. Switching requires manually re-entering your name, address, phone number, and credit card info every time. 3. Any subscriptions you have via Apple Pay w…
That's more of a developer problem than an Apple one. Most of the apps on my phone work in any country around the world. I've used Uber in many countries, Spotify, Netflix... If your bank wants to restrictively localize their app distribution, how is that Apple's fault?
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
The demographic you're referring to - North Americans within the USA who don't know how 24-hour time works - are < 2% of the world's population.
So? What's your point? If you're selling something in the US, and it gave time in 24hr time as the only option, most Americans would hate it.
Most?