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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#391

Post by chintan »

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.

There is an entire new class of species breeding over there: "Artificial Humans" [1]: A quantum state thing that may or may not be a real human. You can never tell. This is beyond Turing test. A real human behaving as bot or vice versa.

[1]. https://trialx.com/blog/google-play-bans-our-covid-app-built...

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#392

Post by kgin »

jussij wrote: post #371

This page says there are 29 places around the world named London: https://geotargit.com/called.php?qcity=London That suggests to me if the answer was not the obvious one and only London England , then the only sensible answer should have been a question asking which other London did you mean?

It’s true, but if you had to pick an arbitrary London, it seems like either largest item closest would make sense. It’s weird it’s neither.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#393

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ken wrote: post #326
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…

But the post points out that Siri from other Apple devices gets it right. Apple’s “generic knowledge system” can answer this. It’s only Apple Watch which has trouble. That’s kind of weird. It’s not that Siri is especially bad. It’s that “Siri” is something different depending on how you query it. Other online search systems aren’t like that, and integration and consistency are typically Apple’s forte.

Seems like an easy plausible explanation is mobile devices (like a watch or phone) take your current location into account, while a stationary device (like a HomePod) does not.

Look, I'm not arguing it's not a bug, but I'm just really surprised at how software people, who I think should know better, are surprised that such bugs exist, or more importantly that completely eliminating all types of this class of bugs is basically impossible with current technology.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#394

Post by mokus »

kohtatsu wrote: post #316
Youden wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear. Assuming you're addressing OP with this part, I think that was their point. When an application presents you with "04/05/2020", you have no way of knowing whether it means crazy American dates or normal-people dates.

This is reason enough for me to use 2020-04-05 exclusively. Lexical order is a bonus.

Just wait, someone will implement that as May 4, 2020.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#395

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Beldin wrote: post #382
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US. Sure. > There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. 1. Same is true for most people in the world 2. Wait, you mean they don't know if 17:00 is early morning or late afternoon?? Seriously, I have a hard time to believe that. I'll believe that most Americans need to convert to am/pm, but not that "huge swaths"…

> My expectations of the average USA'ian are better than that.

Have you looked at the news lately? Seen any of Jimmy Kimmel's "man on the street" interviews?

Most people will know this is sometime in the afternoon, but honestly a large portion of the population would probably think this is 7PM.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#396

Post by dunham »

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…

Still? Siri has actually gotten worse.

In the last year or so it's gone from correctly handling "add red salsa to the shopping list" to consistently adding two items "red" and "salsa". (It also fails on "buttermilk" and others.)

And around the time this started happening, Siri went from acting after a short pause to saying "just a sec" after a short pause.

Perhaps it's time to file a feature request to Apple to allow us to plug in alternative digital assistants in place of Siri.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#397

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Jedd wrote: post #306
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So? What's your point? If you're selling something in the US, and it gave time in 24hr time as the only option, most Americans would hate it.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#399

Post by drstewart »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #315
AmericanChopper wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Failing to consider that your customer base could be international is the definition of blinkered irrationality. You're not just losing goodwill, you're losing potential profits. There are obvious exceptions, like fresh food or anything else with a limited shelf life, and any product that has a distributor chain providing sales and support in a different territory. Beyond that it makes no sense at all, especially for…

What EU companies are Google and Apple losing business to, exactly?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#400

Post by InitialLastName »

danohuiginn wrote: post #356
ben_w wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch! That’s even worse than a pre-smartphone fail I encountered ~15 years ago. I was on a train from London to Liverpool Lime Street Street, and somewhere around Nottingham one of the fellow passengers asked me when it would arrive in Liverpool Street Station.

From Cambridge (UK), you can take trains either to Liverpool or to Liverpool Street Station (in London). Refugees would often be released from a nearby detention center with a ticket and instructions to take the train to Liverpool. More than one ended up lost and befuddled in Liverpool Street. [2nd-hand story from, likewise, 15 years ago. Accuracy not guaranteed]

See also: New York Penn Station and Newark Penn Station are consecutive stops on the North-East Corridor line, and sound identical in conductor-ese. Causes regular panic attacks from first-time riders.
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