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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#661

Post by giarc »

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 if you are Apple and building the Siri product, you think this would be one of the first use cases you would develop and/or test. I remember asking Siri to convert a currency for me and it just showed me search results for 'currency conversion'. Again... wouldn't this be a query you would test for?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#662

Post by sbarre »

kempbellt wrote: post #563

>If you had a human assistant and asked them “What’s the time in London?” and they honestly thought the best way to answer that question was to give you the time for the nearest London, which happened to be in Ontario or Kentucky, you’d fire that assistant. An obvious sign that you would be a shit employer to work for. OP is probably exaggerating here (at least I hope so), but if you were to fire someone over this wi…

Did you understand, or even finish reading, the article?

You utterly and completely missed the point. There is no actual human getting fired, or even the threat of someone getting fired. There isn't even a "someone"!

The point is to highlight the incompetence of Siri the virtual assistant, not to imply that someone needs to be fired. It's an analogy[0].

0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analogy

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#663

Post by schrodinger »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #545
jordanpg wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still an extremely frustrating experience. All of them: Google, Amazon, Apple. That it gets it wrong, ever, is too much for me. The first time I ever had to repeat myself getting directions on the road I was done. I don't understand why anyone other than hobbyists can stand to use these things. They are so obviously years away from ready for serious use, and the novelty value wore off years ago. Not shitposting…

> That it gets it wrong, ever, is too much for me. The first time I ever had to repeat myself getting directions on the road I was done. How can you stand to deal with humans?

Humans are so many orders of magnitude better at comprehension that your comment feels a bit disingenuous.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#664

Post by ratsmack »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #658
rm445 wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these speech assistants are almost stateless, aren't they? I mean, they can ask you questions and go into a listen-for-an-answer state, but, at least last time I tried, you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on. It's quite interesting t…

> you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on. Which is why I have no confidence calling it AI if its not even intelligent. Its just voice recognition on preprogrammed operations.

>Which is why I have no confidence calling it AI...

That's because it really should be called Simulated Intelligence, and would be a much more accurate description. The marketing team wouldn't like this though.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#665

Post by ianferrel »

kempbellt wrote: post #644
saagarjha wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not comparable at all. People make mistakes, they forget; if I asked someone to bring me a coffee and they brought me the beans because they had a brain fart, I might laugh and be OK with it. If they consistently brought me beans and water, I'd think they were being malicious, and if they brought me beans and water, even though they know what a coffee is, and genuinely acted clueless about it, I would be serio…

>I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion at all. The example OP provided is about how asking someone to bring you coffee can produce unexpected results. I furthered the point that it can still happen with trained and experienced baristas - people who make coffee for a living. If someone is being obviously and intentionally malicious by doing a task incorrectly, then yeah, let them go. You'll both likely…

> I furthered the point that it can still happen with trained and experienced baristas - people who make coffee for a living.

You've had a trained barista give you a cup full of unground coffee beans when you asked for a cup of coffee? I find that hard to believe.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#666

Post by slfnflctd »

_ps6d wrote: post #497
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

As a former Uber/Lyft driver, I probably ran into some kind of map error at least once every 8 hours of driving. These databases have a lot more garbage in them than I realized when I wasn't driving as much.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#667

Post by AmericanChopper »

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…

If you have one market where your acquisitions costs are lower per $ in sales than all other markets, you are literally losing money on every $ you invest in sales for any other market. Your intuition for how this works is simply incorrect.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#668

Post by kempbellt »

saagarjha wrote: post #622
kempbellt wrote: post #563

>If you had a human assistant and asked them “What’s the time in London?” and they honestly thought the best way to answer that question was to give you the time for the nearest London, which happened to be in Ontario or Kentucky, you’d fire that assistant. An obvious sign that you would be a shit employer to work for. OP is probably exaggerating here (at least I hope so), but if you were to fire someone over this wi…

> If you saw someone write something like "If you had a human assistant and asked them 'What’s the time in London?' and they honestly thought the best way to answer that question was to give you the time for the nearest London, which happened to be in Ontario or Kentucky, you’d fire that assistant." you'd be quick to call them out as an "obvious" bad employer. No, really, this is just a tired nitpick. I hear a lot of…

I think the point translates just fine.

What I read was, "Siri doesn't give me exactly what I want by perfectly understanding my own personal bias that London means, London, England, so I am going to post a blog complaining about it, while simultaneously cracking a joke that I would terminate someone's employment if they made a basic mistake." Which I took to be pretty unproductive conversation.

Still, point made. OP would be terrible to work for and Siri could potentially use some improvements in accuracy.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#669

Post by mulmen »

recursive wrote: post #652
mulmen wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state? Because they want to know what time it is in a different location. 14 states have more than one time zone. Do you know which ones?

That's a harder question. The important question here is "does your state have more than one time zone?"

No, it isn't important. What's important is how to answer the question that was asked. The number of time zones in a state has nothing to do with the time in a location. You just need to disambiguate what location is the subject of the question.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#670

Post by metrokoi »

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 wonder which will come first: AI that is truly able to teach itself about our world, or that we are able to define algorithms or otherwise figure out software solutions to most of these these context problems. Of course, if an AI is intelligent enough that problem solves itself.

To me it seems that developing AI on that level will be here sooner than developing solutions to many context problems, given the difficulty the best funded algorithms in the world have answering this question which we humans see as very simple.

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