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If you are building a system that mimics human speech you need to teach it to be imperfect and use common parlance. Otherwise you will fall into the uncanny val
by pg_bot 8y ago
If you are building a system that mimics human speech you need to teach it to be imperfect and use common parlance. Otherwise you will fall into the uncanny valley. If you listen to the conversation again there are several points where they lose immersion. For example no one would say 12 pm, they would say 'noon' instead. Google has clearly done some impressive work here, and I'm now a bit more confident/scared that they will be able to successfully fool me in the next few years.
- shashanoid 8y agoYour argument about calling it "noon" instead of "PM" is just illogical. I'd always use PM instead of noon -- whenever I'm trying to be specific about something (appointments and such). I understand the argument you're trying to make but that wasn't enough.
- jstanley 8y agoHow is "PM" more specific than "noon"? Absent the context of this conversation, it's not immediately obvious to me whether 12 PM is midday or midnight, where as "noon" is unambiguous.
- macintux 8y agoI think historically "noon" expresses less precision, although I suspect that's less true now that everyone always knows what time it is and has GPS in their pocket to help calculate arrival times. 20 years ago, had I said to someone "I'll be there at 12pm" it would have had a stronger implication of precision than "I'll be there at noon." I don't think it's true today.
- jstanley 8y agoUnderstood. So the difference is you interpret "noon" as an ill-defined probability distribution centred roughly around midday, rather than a concrete point in time, whereas you interpret "12PM" as a concrete point in time. Fair enough.
- macintux 8y agoGo back further and "noon" is "whenever the sun is at its zenith" so we've definitely made strides.
- itronitron 8y ago12pm is also commonly interpreted as midnight so "12 noon" or "12 midnight" is generally preferred when scheduling meetings or deadlines in order to avoid confusion.