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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#181

Post by taejo »

brownbat wrote: post #132
Veen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).

A group of us once tried to rank cities in Europe by population only to realize that most of them are effectively incomparable. Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so th…

While it is arbitrary, and not a city (in the sense that it hasn't received that status from the Queen), Greater London is absolutely a defined administrative area in the UK, with a governing body (the London Assembly) and a mayor (the Mayor of London -- not the Lord Mayor of London, who is the mayor of the City of London).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#182

Post by mattmanser »

chappar wrote: post #83
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…

I had never used an Apple product before the company which I joined recently gave me a MacBook Pro. I am really surprised how bad the product quality is. The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. Similarly the keyboard shortcut is random. Sometimes it opens the app, sometimes it does not…

It's not just Apple, I've got a Mi phone, sometimes reminders pop up hours after they happened. They've mucked around with the default android lockscreen to save power and I think this is causing the problem.

The devices are so complicated now that they cant do their most basic functions right.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#183

Post by nromiun »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #131
mattlondon wrote: post #76

I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing. It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million. I've always just…

For a lot of products, US sales are just worth so much more than sales from anywhere else, that it is reasonably common to not care much about the rest of the world. I’ve worked for a few companies that started out with a heavy focus on localization, but eventually realized it was just a massive waste of money.

The issue isn't doing business in just America. The issue is the communication. Some services will have big banners like "Works everywhere flawlessly" and then (if you are lucky) in some dark corner of the FAQ there will be a tiny sentence, "Only available in US for now" (translation: it will never be available anywhere else).

Even global companies like Google, Amazon do this.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#184

Post by huffmsa »

empath75 wrote: post #115
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 even sucks at setting timers. I asked to set a timer for 50 minutes and it clearly said 50 minutes on the screen and then “corrected” it to 15 minutes. For a while, it randomly decided that “call my wife” meant to “call my mom.” It clearly said call my wife on the screen and then switched to “mom”.

Ask it to set a timer for 5/6ths of an hour.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#185

Post by swebs »

rland wrote: post #70

I've read that Siri collects/sends home significantly less information about the user than its counterparts. It might just be that "getting it right" requires a complete violation of user privacy. I actually am perfectly fine with this.

Duckduckgo got it right, and it doesn't send any user data. Also, I think a system shouldn't have to know anything about you to know that you're not asking about London, Canada.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#186

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #169
mattlondon wrote: post #76

I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing. It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million. I've always just…

In the recent (~5y) past, I've asked Google Maps, from within London, a route to Charing Cross Station and been given the one in Glasgow.

In the past few months I decided to give Apple Maps another try to see if it's any good. I tried to get directions from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Victoria. It tried to send me to Victoria BC, Canada.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#187

Post by wickerman »

mattlondon wrote: post #76

I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing. It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million. I've always just…

Another irritating bit about this is that when I search for news about my country in my language, spanish (I live in London, the UK one Siri, not the american one) I still get a number of english language results first.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#189

Post by dgellow »

mattmanser wrote: post #138

He says duckduckgo got it right, but that not true, he got lucky. When I ask DDG for "the weather in Nottingham", it often answers with the weather of a tiny town in the US, instead of the major city in the UK. Duckduckgo is also dumb.

DuckDuckGo just delegates to other search engines.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#190

Post by roland35 »

chappar wrote: post #83
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…

I had never used an Apple product before the company which I joined recently gave me a MacBook Pro. I am really surprised how bad the product quality is. The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. Similarly the keyboard shortcut is random. Sometimes it opens the app, sometimes it does not…

I had this problem too. Maybe try charging it on the other side. It sounds crazy but it's true:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957573

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