711–720 of 776 posts
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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.
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> Where does such unpredictability come from? How can Siri transcribe the words correctly but fail to deliver the right answer? Voice assistants generally use both the text transcription and a bunch of contextual metadata as input. That metadata could include things like what's currently visible on the screen, your location, your recent queries, etc. So even though the underlying algorithms powering the assistant may…
I looked up the last screenshot I had of this. What I asked was "In 2 days remind me to call FRIEND_NAME", and Siri created a reminder that just said "call". Transcribed perfectly, wrong content in the reminder. I tried it again right after, and the reminder said "call FRIEND_NAME". I don't think there was any previous conversational context or anything like that. Hard to fathom how that could happen.
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…
What if you asked Google "what's the weather?" and it gave you a dictionary response of "weather" as an answer? Or with more snark, responded with, "I don't know. Look outside". "What is the weather report for today/this week?" is a more accurate question, despite an annoying amount of verbosity. But answers are still given relatively. "Cloudy" could be an accurate answer, for now . But it will be "Sunny" this aftern…
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…
Not in my experience. This is how 80% of my Google Assistant conversations go: Me: "Hey Google, play Nine Inch Nails, you know, the one in my Google Play library" Google: "OK, playing Nine Inch Snails, a band nobody on Earth has heard of and is definitely not in your library!" Me: (Repeat a few times, trying all kinds of accents, eventually I get tired of songs about nine inch somethings , and I pull the car over and…
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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…
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> If the person asking the question lives in Ohio, they may actually be talking about London OH (or Dublin OH). I would seriously doubt this assumption. Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state? On the contrary, this context information would make it much more likely that the person actually meant "London, England". Except if ther…
> Why on earth should someone living in a state specifically ask for the local time in a different location within that same state? True, and that's another contextual layer to deal with: that e.g. the state of Ohio is in a single timezone and that - why on Earth should someone ask the time within the same timezone? - like you said. And then there may be contextual exceptions even from this rule...
the fact that americans are inclined to say the state name as part of the name of a place could also help - since they might say london ohio, london might be more likely to mean the real london.
For a related example, type "11:00 EST to UTC" into Google and DuckDuckGo. Google says 15:00 because it interprets "EST" colloquially as "the current time on east coast US". DuckDuckGo says 16:00 because it interprets EST literally as "the time on east coast when it isn't daylight savings time" (compared to ET or EDT). It isn't clear which behavior is more desirable.
If he scheduled a call for 15:00 "GMT", he would call in at 14:00 GMT instead and wondered why the international callers aren't showing up.
So the kind of "automatic fixing of ignorance" Google does could be annoying and ruin some stuff.
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ha! I was wondering how hard it'd be to find someone making an appeal to "context". While you're not exactly wrong, you are. Parsing meaning is something humans are surprisingly good at, and trained for. I think the most damning part is how, at the bottom, he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time... for now. But, his point about consistency and slowness is exactly why I neve…
> he list a handful of other "smart" assistants which correctly list London UK's time... It's only correct if that is what you secretly asked for. If I have never travelled to Europe and I am planning a trip to London, Canada then in my subjective world I would kind of be disappointed when my digital assistant told me the time of London, UK. That person would have equally zero understanding, like "WTF SIRI, why would…
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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.?
Canada kept a few.
I guess mississippi is one but most US places have white names.
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I disagree. Should the resident of London, Ontario say it every time to a virtual assistant about the weather when it should be obvious they are interested in the place of residence? And so on, all the same context layers apply (British expat in London, Ontario, etc.)
If they were somehow calling a global hotline that could answer arbitrary questions for free, then yes, I suspect someone in Ontario would still clarify. If it was a local hotline, maybe not. Which is Siri?
What if you were calling an individual human personal assistant who knew you lived in London, Ontario?
What if you had previously clarified to this person that when you said London, you meant London, Ontario?
I think both of these questions ought to be relevant to the digital personal assistants that we're creating.