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Siri, What Time Is It in London?

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Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#71

Post by teruakohatu »

globular-toast wrote: post #54
denster wrote: post #20

I think dates, times, UTC offsets, and locales/cultures is a topic we frequently think of as "that's easy" [1] when in practice it's painstakingly hard to get right. As an example, we've spent the past few days on our eng team refining our spreadsheet functions for date/time handling, and it's like the 5th time we've iterated on this (after supporting everything Excel / Google Sheets do). Funny part is, I'm sure we'l…

Any developer who thinks dates, times, UTC offsets and locales/cultures is "easy" is grossly incompetent (unless, of course, they've never worked with human-facing software before, in which case their naiveté can be forgiven).

I think you underestimate newbie developers. The nightmare that is dates and times is something that you learn from experience, not at university.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#72

Post by Veen »

craigsmansion wrote: post #30

"you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. " Oh, if only, John. But then, who'd write for your blog? (if you feel that's unwarranted: "Daring Fireball" was the outlet that wrote a character assassination piece on rms, backed by some irrefutable evidence, that turned out to be about esr, and nobody performed even the most cas…

For the interested, here is Gruber's explanation, correction, and apology.

https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_e...

I don't think "I sincerely and deeply regret the error." is fairly described as "sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#73

Post by [deleted] »

dusted wrote: post #27
new2628 wrote: post #6

It is amusing that someone thinking London means London, Canada should be fired for stupidity, but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) hours to his current time and needs an elaborate device to do it is seen as smart and insightful. This is some pretentious BS.

My reply to the deleted comment by dkdbejwi383 > Haha yeah you're so much smarter than him. Somebody should give you an award! I think his post is motivated by the kind of pretentious assholery that emanates from the kind of world view, or view on other humans that the article rerflects, that assistants are objects to be fired over whatever opinion their "owner" has on what is to be considered stupid or not. "Oh! My…

[deleted]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#74

Post by qayxc »

Dobbs wrote: post #7

I hit this all the time with "Salt Lake City", it gives me the time in India. Despite the fact that my phone should know that I have tens of contacts in Utah, but few if any in India.

I've never even heard of a Salt Lake City in India before...

Wow,that is seriously messed up, because it's wrong even IN India, as they would of course refer to the city as Bidhannagar or just "Salt Lake" what with "City" not being part of the actual name.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#75

Post by mojuba »

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 people in neighbouring states may mean the same, though they will be more likely to mention the state. However, how close should you be to London, OH even within the state to mean the Ohio one and not the UK one? How close is close enough? Is a few hours of driving close enough? A 3 hour flight? What if I'm roughly at 6 hours from London OH and 7 hours from London UK?

Further, if the person is a British expat in Ohio, especially if they are working for a multinational business (or not), they would more likely mean London UK. German expats, though? Russians? Or an Irish person who lives in Amsterdam having some relatives in Ohio US, looking to book a flight to Dublin. Etc. etc.

There are so many contextual layers here that even human assistants can occasionally get it wrong, and without the context the task becomes insurmountable for the "AI" algorithms. That is not to say virtual assistants are useless, just that selling them as "AI" is a big lie, bigger than even those who market these algorithms as "AI" think it is.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#76

Post by mattlondon »

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 pegged it down to the usual cultural-blindness that we come to expect from SV companies that there isn't anything beyond north America (e.g. "global launches" only being for USA, Canada, and Costa Rica etc) and that if your language is "en" then you must be American or Canadian with everyone else being funny foreigners that "we don't support, sorry"

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#77

Post by MachineGunPablo »

dustinmoris wrote: post #51

An actual assistant would have a lot of context. Do I know that you're going to travel to London, UK for a break next week and therefore I would naturally assume that you are interesting in the time there. However, are you planning to visit your parents in London, Canada this weekend? Then an assistant who would still answer with the time of London, UK would maybe also not be the smartest? So really context is everyt…

Ouch

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#78

Post by brnt »

Hamuko wrote: post #11

Same thing happens with Frankfurt. If I order something from Amazon.de, my package usually goes through Frankfurt. When I checked my package tracker app on my iPhone, I was surprised to find out that Frankfurt is actually on the Germany-Poland border. Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead…

If you ever cross the border from Frankfurt/Oder, the first thing you see in Poland is a giant Amazon building. Despite that building being there, Polish people still can't order at Amazon.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#79

Post by enlyth »

jka wrote: post #62
Veen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).

Yep; my (indirect) point is that there are multiple possible reasons why Siri may have made the judgement that London, Ontario was more relevant when answering. My guess is that Apple would find it difficult to provide robust references to John to explain why it happened, or how they've fixed it for him (and whether that fix is a one-off workaround for his complaint, etc..)

People always expect the 'obvious' interpretation, but sometimes it's difficult to define exactly what that means for everyone. As another poster said here, context is also a very important factor.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#80

Post by teruakohatu »

ramblerman wrote: post #53
teruakohatu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think treating Siri like a digital version of a Personal Assistant is going a bit far. It is a simple Voice Interface to a bunch of apps, local databases and cloud databases. Nobody has ever said "Should I buy an Apple Watch for $750 or hire a PA for $35,000/year?".

Google demoed an AI that could call the barber and make an appointment for you about a year ago. I think it shows a lack of imagination on your part to NOT make that connection.

> lack of imagination on your part to NOT make that connection

I hope you didn't fire your PA after that AI demo!

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