Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Siri, What Time Is It in London?

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 776 posts

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#681

Post by ajmurmann »

pgodzin wrote: post #619
sweethuman wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what bugs me the most about the Google Play Music Library is that it won't sync up with the YouTube Music Library... They have two different music services which I can use with one subscription but I can't have some of the songs on both of them or have one single library.

You're going to have to, as they're going to merge https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/05/16/how-to-transfer-pla...

Thanks for calling this out! I guess I really should check regularly for every Google service I use if it's being discontinued yet.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#682

Post by ajmurmann »

ratsmack wrote: post #664
giancarlostoro wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are they even simulating intelligence. To the parent poster's point it's really just simulated voice recognition. No intelligence even gets simulated. This is more like running cucumber scripts based on voice recognition.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#683

Post by behnamoh »

metrokoi wrote: post #670
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 difficul…

That's exactly what gave rise to the first "AI Winter". People had to hard-code things. But with NN and esp. Deep Learning, they thought there's no need to write programs for pattern recognition anymore; the "AI" just learns it on its own.

That wishful thinking has turned out to be dangerous tho, as we have moved towards an ML-dominated world where we don't even know how the ML algorithms produce specific results.

Add that to their bizarre behavior (like this example with Siri) and you'll realize chances of another AI Winter are not low. If we have to develop solutions to many context problems one by one, that may reduce so much of the hype and interest in "AI". We'd be basically back to square one.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#684

Post by behnamoh »

jvm_ wrote: post #505
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…

Anyone want to guess where this sign is located? https://imgur.com/XyTJHEc

As a non-American, can someone explain why there are US cities with the exact same names as cities in Europe, Egypt, Greece, etc.?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#685

Post by behnamoh »

BruceEel wrote: post #192
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…

Exactly. And what about if I initially DO specify it's London Ontario that I'm interested in but five minutes later I ask again, referring to it simply as "London".. shouldn't a "better Siri" come back with 'assuming you still mean London Ontario, it's...' ? I think it's possible that general acceptance of these non-AI gimmicks being referred to as "AI" will end up pushing genuine progress in true AI further into the…

Agreed. These solutions seems gimmicky. AI as it is today is really a chain of "if"s. I think aside from some amazing results in niche areas, so much of the attention to ML in general (and DL in particular) is just due to marketing. It's a bubble in many cases, but since everyone is doing it, companies decide to do it as well.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#686

Post by wpowiertowski »

My usual dialog with siri:

Me: "Hey Siri, play Radiolab podcast"

Siri: Which Radiolab podcast, Radiolab or Radiolab: More Perfect"

Me: "Radiolab"

Siri: Which Radiolab podcast, Radiolab or Radiolab: More Perfect"

Me: "Radiolab"

Siri: Which Radiolab podcast, Radiolab or Radiolab: More Perfect"

...

Me: "The first one"

Siri: "I don't know >the first oneMe: "Siri you're useless"

Siri: "That's not nice"

Me: "Could be but it's true"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#687

Post by behnamoh »

polote wrote: post #253
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 have worked on that problem recently, and yes it is really hard. You will be surprised on how many cities are named 'San francisco' in the world : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(disambiguation)

I often think city names must constitute some part of their citizens' identity. How is living in a fake San Francisco pleasant for people who live there?

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#688

Post by grayclhn »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #584

Once I had a new assistant and I asked her to book me a flight to Boston. She went to the travel booking system, typed in Boston, then called me back confused. "Which Boston do you want? There are 8 of them?" I was caught off guard and told her I'd prefer the one in Massachusetts. I did not fire her. She was young, had a poor general education, and had never traveled outside her home state. Those things do not make h…

Note that she didn't book you a flight to the nearest Boston either.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#689

Post by GilbertErik »

reaperducer wrote: post #561
kilo_bravo_3 wrote: post #523

Siri doesn't know that my front door is called "FRONT DOOR". I only have one smart lock, which works perfectly, and it is called "FRONT DOOR" in HomeKit. When I ask Siri about my FRONT DOOR she responds that she cannot find it. When I ask Siri about the status of my DOOR, she responds with "The FRONT DOOR is locked/unlocked". I'll then say 'Alright Siri you literally just used the phrase "FRONT DOOR" five seconds ago…

About once a week Siri and I have this conversation: Me: "Siri, turn off the bedroom lights." Siri: "OK. Your 6am alarm is off." For the most part Siri works for me, with the exception of the above and her insistence on adding "ginger ale" to my grocery list as two items. /Native English speaker, specifically trained in non-regional diction because I used to work on-air in radio.

In the past week:

me: "Hey Google, add half and half to the shopping list."

gh: "I've added those two things."

-----

me: "Set an alarm for 2:30 tomorrow"

gh:

...

wife at 2:30AM: "hey... HEY... why's the alarm in the kitchen downstairs going off?"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#690

Post by smabie »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #584

Once I had a new assistant and I asked her to book me a flight to Boston. She went to the travel booking system, typed in Boston, then called me back confused. "Which Boston do you want? There are 8 of them?" I was caught off guard and told her I'd prefer the one in Massachusetts. I did not fire her. She was young, had a poor general education, and had never traveled outside her home state. Those things do not make h…

I mean, you can become smarter. She does sound stupid, but fortunately, maybe she can change that.
Post reply on HN