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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#231

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

Anything can be ranked as long as you clearly define the ranking metric first.

When ranking by population it often makes most sense to use the population of the metropolitan area. That is, to ignore the administrative divisions, which vary too much, and focus on the physical reality of the urban area.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#232

Post by AmericanChopper »

nromiun wrote: post #218
AmericanChopper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In situations like that non-US consumers aren’t their customers, and they’re simply not interested in communicating with them.

Then why are they on the internet? Aren't they aware that non-US people can also access it? And if they aren't interested then why do they add "for now" to their message? And are you telling me global companies like Google and Amazon don't have any non-US customers? I don't know which world is that but I want to live in it.

Google and Amazon aren’t particularly good examples of this. They don’t have very many services that are only available to US customers.

But there are plenty of businesses that only trade with US customers, and make little effort to ensure that’s clear on their websites. To answer your question, the reason companies like that don’t put special effort into making this more clear is because while some people might think this is a problem, it’s certainly not their problem. If somebody browses their website for 20 minutes, decided to make a purchase, and realizes they can’t, the business hasn’t lost anything. That person was never going to be their customer to begin with, and it’s not exactly easy to put together a business case for improving UX for people who will never be customers.

Im not really making any value judgements about doing this, I’m just giving you the perfectly rational explanation for how this occurs.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#233

Post by latch »

gambiting wrote: post #223
Kye wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b... with a nice svg on the side.

I wouldn't say "entire countries", but definitely a lot of people. I grew up (in canada) with 12 hour clocks.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#234

Post by Kye »

Recursing wrote: post #229
gambiting wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

I think almost everybody in European countries knows about AM/PM, but I certainly get confused by 11:59 AM vs 12:00 AM

On the topic: Siri will ask you to clarify if you set a reminder too close to midnight. "Did you mean 11am tomorrow?" It also works on the other side: set a reminder for "2" at 1am and it'll ask you to specify.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#235

Post by aasasd »

neor wrote: post #179
pjc50 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not just that it is wrong, nor that it doesn't have enough personal information, but that it lacks proper personalisation and the ability to learn. You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household. "Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perfor…

Siri indeed never learns. I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri. I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.

That might be because the activation words are recognized by a separate chip (so it's low-power and works offline). Whereas the rest of the conversation is with the software service.

At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#236

Post by shwoopdiwoop »

Asking what is “1000+5%” in MacOS Spotlight (command + space) has a different result than using the calculator or Siri. It doesn’t make it less confusing that spotlight is even showing a calculator icon when doing that!

Spotlight: 1,000.05 Siri: 1,050 Calculator: 1,050

I wonder now what else I screwed up by using the spotlight shortcut.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#237

Post by dkarp »

Kye wrote: post #230
gambiting wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

I don't intuitively know 17:00 is afternoon. I have to think about it. You get used to what you grow up with.

It also may or may not be evening [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#238

Post by Tarq0n »

calineczka wrote: post #211
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…

I would summarise it as: use separate keywords instead of sentences. "Change Light Bulb" instead of "how to change a light bulb". "Black Science Guy", "Kevin Durant height", "rails has_many api", etc... Recently Google got much better in understanding full sentences and there are tons of SEO optimized pages for certain phrases. Nevertheless, using keywords is what I imagine advanced users do.

It also got much worse at keyword searches. It seems like the one capability came at the cost of the other.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#239

Post by csomar »

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…

Yesterday I was washing the car while listening to Music with the air pods. I mistakenly clicked them and it launched Siri which for some reason it called a number on my phone through Facetime.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#240

Post by AmericanChopper »

pjc50 wrote: post #228
AmericanChopper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In situations like that non-US consumers aren’t their customers, and they’re simply not interested in communicating with them.

This isn't true for either Apple or Google or Facebook, all of which are determinedly global in their sales and marketing.

They’re also very weak examples of companies that do this. For starters, Apples localization is quite on point most of the time. Facebook and Google really don’t have many features at all that are territorially exclusive.
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