Siri, What Time Is It in London? • Hacker News Board

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#341

Post by tjpnz » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

wcarss wrote: post #275

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…

Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

>I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

That's not going to get you anywhere - they're not listening.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#342

Post by ranieuwe » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

ojilles wrote: post #226

aib wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/05/2020"?

The best are that have a settings page where they try to give an example. But use a day-of-month =< 12. Like your example. It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear.

I so much just prefer Apr-05 2020. Clear to all.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#343

Post by emiliobumachar » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #298

TBH 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…

Siri may be a marvel of modern technology. If the competition does better, than it's reasonable to complain about Siri.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#344

Post by Asooka » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

tjpnz wrote: post #341

wcarss wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

>I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times. That's not going to get you anywhere - they're not listening.

On the bright side, screaming at the void can be therapeutic for some people...

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#345

Post by ranieuwe » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #317

aib wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/05/2020"?

I actually didn't realize am/pm wasn't something Europeans did...

We love what US calls “military time”

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#346

Post by fiblye » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #239

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.

I always immediately disable siri because something similar happened the very first week I got my first iPhone. It seems to want to call the one person you haven't talked to in years.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#347

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

smellsdonkey wrote: post #325

Not necessarily on topic but my biggest gripe with voice assistants is that they work like a web search. You can ask what the state of the world is NOW but you can get them to let you know when things happen. I want "Alexa, let me know when XXX is having a concert nearby" or "Alexa, tell me when XX is on sale". That's what I really want.

Things like this would be killer. These are things a real human assistant could easily do and are deceivingly difficult for a computer.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#348

Post by barneygale » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #172

ensiferum wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the "world series" for major league baseball played in the US and Canada. ;-)

A tired quip that doesn't get more clever with time. Guess what? The "World Cup" didn't invite any soccer teams from Africa or Asia to their 1930 tournament but they still called it a World Cup. The UK wasn't even part of FIFA at the time but they still pretended it was a "world cup".

Even in 1930 it involved several nations, and that was /ninety years ago/

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#349

Post by ape4 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

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 time you probably don't want the nearest. If you are 200km from London, Ontario you are most likely in the same timezone so you want London, UK. However for driving you do want the nearest.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#350

Post by anewdirection » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #286

neor wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Activation words are fuzzy by design. Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant. It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.

When those designs strip your privacy, 'fuzzy by design' is cery much a bug to the user, and only a feature to the company mining the data.