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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#491

Post by parliament32 »

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…

Same deal for me but with Google. I had to turn it off because it kept activating itself, despite voice training it to apparently just my voice. I'd be driving in the car by myself, playing music (via BT, from Google Play, on the same phone!) and it would randomly pause my music and give me an assistant prompt (after, I assume, hearing something in the song that it was playing itself that sounded like OK Google). It was absolutely infuriating and would come up a few times a week.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#492

Post by mehrdadn »

interestica wrote: post #459
mehrdadn wrote: post #140

On that note, anybody know how often poor souls have booked flights to the wrong "Ontario, CA" because of this mess?

Would you trust Siri or any assistant to book a flight for you?

Sorry, I think my comment was confusing. By "this mess" I wasn't referring to the assistant screwing up, but rather the searches themselves bringing up an unexpected location with a similar name, even if you typed them yourself.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#493

Post by parliament32 »

osrec wrote: post #166
eknkc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17). My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.

So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.

Honestly I'd dare to say most of Apple's market right now is purely from vendor lock-in. Both their hardware and software are getting worse, but not bad enough for people to switch their entire digital lives to a different ecosystem.. not yet, anyway.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#494

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

I agree with you, but then consider all the influential people who think the exact same category of technology--AI aka machine learning--will produce a self-driving car that is safer than human drivers, or take away every human job in X years.

I think it's very worthwhile to point out these seemingly basic errors as a way to maintain appropriate skepticism about the limits of our technology.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#495

Post by slowmovintarget »

mojuba wrote: post #257
pintxo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The time in London, England, is 8:23pm."

"No, I meant the time in London, Ontario"

"Sure. The time in London, Ontario, is 3:23pm."

You start by doing a best guess, and actually listening for a correction. For other kinds of requests, you reply with a best guess and ask for confirmation or for clarifying questions.

Hard, yes. Not impossible.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#496

Post by hrktb »

anewdirection wrote: post #350
hrktb wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I may be biased as I helped a voice recognition internal project in a previous life.

It’s a genuinely hard problem to solve, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple for instance when they have humans reviewing samples. There may be other motivations, there’s ton of people in any of these companies, any given feature must be seen from a different angle depending on the department looking at it.

But I think a lot of what we see as privacy violating is primarily an effect of the flaws and all the hacks needed to make the feature work at all (when it works).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#497

Post by _ps6d »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #443
jvolkman wrote: post #357

At some point about a year ago I noticed that I could no longer ask my Google Home devices "what's the weather?". I'd just get a generic "I don't understand" response. But more specific queries such as "What's the weather in Seattle?" would work. After a couple of weeks of this, I somehow got the idea that it was related to the devices' configured locations. And sure enough, telling the Home that I lived in the next…

But if you had not worked at Google at the time, there’s basically zero chance you could’ve got anyone at the company to do anything about it.

My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps.

I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#498

Post by KMnO4 »

thebouv wrote: post #490

Siri is terrible. "Call mom" sometimes calls my mom, who is in my favorites (I have 4 people in favorites: mom, wife, daughter, brother). Sometimes it decides to call "wife's mom" Sometimes it says "which mom" then lists "mom, wife's mom" Mom, literally the word mom, is in my favorites. I use it almost daily. And yet, Siri doesn't remember this, doesn't create relevancy, it doesn't even decide "Let's look at Favorite…

FWIW, if you never refer to "wife's mom" as "mom", you can change the required pronunciation in the contact details. Then, Siri will only activate if you say "Call wiyefesmom"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#499

Post by DenisM »

jvolkman wrote: post #486
lowdose wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your neighborhood or was this a more structural problem and did your collegeas find more locations with similar issues?

IIRC it had something to do with the parent hierarchy of my neighborhood. It was parented by both a postal code and a city, or something. I'm probably making that up, but I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to create and maintain abstractions for every possible geographic situation. I wasn't aware of any other occurrences.

Not only a zip code can span cities, a single city/zip can span multiple tax authorities e.g. parts of Redmond, WA zip code 98052 are under Regional Transit Authority and others are not.

I think that pretty much any assumption we're making about strict hierarchy are bound to be broken at some point.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#500

Post by jp_sc »

eshyong wrote: post #473
DrJokepu wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you live in a state like Nebraska that spans across multiple time zones…

True, there are definitely edge cases to account for. Maybe the problem is these AI assistants are trying to make everything location-aware when that may not always be the desired behavior. If there are ambiguities the assistant could ask you to clarify, but that might make for a worse UX.

Or answer both, like a human would do: "It's 3pm in London/England and 9am in London/Ohio"
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