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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

daringfireball.net

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#251

Post by maliker »

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 wonder if anyone is working on special languages for talking to voice interfaces. Maybe a reduced grammar would allow for better recognition accuracy and reliability. And we could get more helpful corrections.

The problem reminds me of the difficulty of programming in applescript. In applescript, articles like "the" can be inserted optionally in the code, and there are lots of equivalent ways to write things, i.e. "if x equals y" is the same as "if x is equal to y". As a result I never remember the syntax, and error messages are less helpful.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#252

Post by lapnitnelav »

ernesth wrote: post #101
sacado2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the bor…

France is indeed the best/worst example as it is the current country spanning the most timezones (13).

Le soleil ne se couche jamais sur la République.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#253

Post by polote »

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…

I have worked on that problem recently, and yes it is really hard.

You will be surprised on how many cities are named 'San francisco' in the world : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(disambiguation)

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#254

Post by Jdam »

My favorite Siri moment since like iOS 7 is when I ask Siri to turn off all alarms:

".......... one moment please ........... there's a problem with the network connection".

No. There. Is. Not. In fact, all alarms always get deactivated. All other queries immediately before or after work fine.

The failure rate when I ask that is no less than 100% for me. Just sad.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#255

Post by whywhywhywhy »

artsyca wrote: post #220

We've reached peak Daring Fireball

Think we passed that a good while ago to be honest. Used to be a good read a few years back but just comes across as damage control at this point. "Siri isn't very good" is hardly a controversial opinion in 2020.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#256

Post by eitland »

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

Never think of AM/PM except when dealing with badly designed software.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#257

Post by mojuba »

pintxo wrote: post #201
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…

How about asking for context if it's not clear? Any reasonable human assistant would ask if the context is not clear (enough).

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.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#258

Post by nromiun »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #232
nromiun wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

An example from Google is YouTube TV.

I have seen countless people raising issues about why they can't use some services and after some time the people from the service will finally tell them it's because they aren't in the US. All of this can be simply solved with a simple "Only available in the US" in the front page. And if Google is to be believed human support is quite pricy.

And no, it isn't complicated. Not for designers or developers. (I am not a good designer but I have developed many websites.)

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#259

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

jen20 wrote: post #215
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, what's funny about that is I picked Preston as a random town in the UK that I thought probably doesn't have a name-twin somewhere else!

There's also Preston, Maryland in the US - finding UK town names which are not repeated elsewhere is hard! It also makes driving around New England most confusing, since towns which _should not_ be in the same direction often are...

I just spent longer than reasonable zooming into random parts of Canada, it's quite funny seeing places like Morpeth south of London. And also satisfying to see Kent and Essex are neighbours in Canada, too. There were some surprising ones too, like Uttoxeter having a name-twin

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#260

Post by addHocker »

My personal theory is - that voice assistants are intentionally bad, to hide the amount of data collected, even though annonymized, from the people.

They are a Trekkie dream, used by now as a clown to hide the ultimate information grab.

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