> At least when most computer systems are wrong they’re consistently wrong.
I disagree.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
301–310 of 776 posts
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have to constantly "clarify your thoughts" because your assistant is incapable of basic inferences based on context and general knowledge, then they aren't likely to be much use as an assistant.
Maybe GPS data and the fact that due to a pandemic there's a travel ban the actual intelligent answer is in fact "London, Canada" and only a stupid person would fail to see that? We can spin this all day long. The truth is, if you want a very specific answer, and you fail to ask a specific question, then you're the only one to blame.
I see a lot of people here making references to the pandemic but as far as I remember this behavior hasn't really changed since last Year before the pandemic. John Gruber presumably can't travel to either London right now anyways so choosing the nearest London rather then the most known London isn't particularly smarter just because there is a pandemic.
Also I personally ask a question like this (and I assume many people do as well) if I want to call someone which is notably unaffected by the pandemic.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one.. There will be a lot more people who are asking about the British London than people who are asking about their nearest London. Apple will be making far more people sad by defaulting to the local…
Selecting a default behaviour based on what "most people" will benefit from is great some cases, but mostly cases people will encounter only once. People who happen to fall beside the "most" category should not have to deal with that every single time. The right thing to do for Siri is to ask, maybe just once, which london you want to know the time for, if its not smart enough to infer it from something else it's lea…
Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's entirely likely that they travel there more often...
It's also reasonable to assume they're in the same timezone as 'their' London and wouldn't need to ask what time it is in the local one. That's another reason to default to one further away, which for most people would be Britain.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#304Interesting. I can see how the basic algorithm might go "I've been asked for the time (or temp or whatever) in cityname. Citynames are routinely reused globally; what is the closest such cityname?"
But that fails completely when you get to names like London (or Paris or Moscow or Cairo).
But it happens with people, too. I'm from Mississippi, though I haven't lived there since I left for college. I now live in Houston. At a family reunion many years ago, I ran into a cousin I hadn't seen since we were kids. She asked where I was living, and I told her.
"Oh, isn't it terrible about that wreck?" she asked.
Baffled, I asked for more information. "Oh, you know, that wreck over on 406!"
I did not know. "I'm sorry, Houston's really huge. I don't know what wreck you mean."
"Oh, did you mean you live in Houston, TEXAS? I thought you meant Houston, MISSISSIPPI!"
I was, at the time, about 30. I grew up in that state, and lived there until I went to college. And until that moment, I had never even HEARD of Houston, Mississippi (a metropolis, it turns out, of about 3600 people in the misbegotten northeast corner of the state).
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
it’s %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z as God intended! (and i’m an american!)
Is it a joke? Year should be in the first column.
22 May 2020 09:28:30 +5
by all means use iso6081 for everything else, but i genuinely prefer the above in daily human facing use.
it’s in commmon use in the US military, and at least passingly common elsewhere. Not something normal people do here, but it’s be nice.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#306Earlier 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?
There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. And even for the Americans that do know, virtually all of them (unless they are in the military or another profession that commonly uses 24h time), will have to "translate" by subtracting 12 in their head for PM times. 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.
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.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, Google Assistant is not that much better. In the last few months it has become absurdly racist against my Italian accent, replying to me in Italian after I ask stuff in English - and getting the question wrong anyway. But yes, Siri is the worst.
Are you sure it's due to your accent? That seems like a difficult feature to even implement. I know Google loves to play language shenanigans based on your current IP address.
I live in England.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#308TBH I always feel amazed about how worked up people get about stuff like this, especially people familiar with software who should know that there are millions, maybe billions of edge cases like this in a generic knowledge system, and thus at least it's easy to make a mistake like this. I mean, the time it took him to write his blog post is probably more than all the times it would take him to follow up with "What ti…
Just because it's hard to implement right doesen't mean Apple should get a pass. I mean, they aren't forced to create a voice assistant by regulation. If they can't make a good one, (and this applies to Amazon and Microsoft too) they should have just left it in the lab until they can.
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - really wish more people would use ISO date format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
There’s a subreddit for that too. https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/
There’s also an xkcd for that
https://xkcd.com/1179/
(Because there’s an xkcd for pretty much everything)
Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think treating Siri like a digital version of a Personal Assistant is going a bit far. It is a simple Voice Interface to a bunch of apps, local databases and cloud databases. Nobody has ever said "Should I buy an Apple Watch for $750 or hire a PA for $35,000/year?".
I would expect a 10 year old core feature on my $1750 phone / watch combination to perform better than my 3 year old.
I'm not a parent, so just speculating wildly, but there's a good chance your 3 year old has already cost more that $1750. Also, having met a few in my extended family I would doubt that a 3 year old not from London would actually know the time there, even if they could properly disambiguate the question. The phone seems like good value by that comparison