39 ms·

Siri, What Time Is It in London?

• wadkar 6y ago
  It’s the typical example of the meaning problem. Any token derives its meaning from a context. Think of the context as requirement of setting up a careful experiment to measure the spin of an electron. Without the context, we have reasonable confidence that it’s an electron but don’t have any clue if it’s spin up or spin down. Similarly in this case, we’re reasonably confident that London is a place on earth with a property of time that is being asked. But without the additional context (or supplementary logic) we can’t know for sure which London it is: Canadian, American, or English. Until we provide such context, London is in a superposition of all the possible meaningful state.
• sheeshkebab 6y ago
  Modern ai has no “common sense”. Worse yet, no one knows what it is or how to add it. It’s why self driving cars can’t really drive, search results produce nonsense, speech recognition barely works, robots can’t do much.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bsanr2 6y ago
  >You wouldn’t fire them for getting that one answer wrong, you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. You’d never have hired them in the first place, really, because there’s no way a person this stupid would get through a job interview. I feel like we're really bad at distinguishing deficits in intelligence from deficits in acculturation.
• Apocryphon 6y ago
  Shouldn’t they simply default it to the most populous city by that name, or some other criterion for “better-known”?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• glaberficken 6y ago
  Disambiguation is hard?
• new2628 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ksec 6y ago
    > but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add. And neither do I know if said country, region or city is having whatever DayLight Saving hours etc.
    • erikbye 6y ago
      > The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add You know, how about you learn it? Once. Instead of asking Siri or Google every time. In other words, learn to fish.
      • molteanu 6y ago
        Good one!
      • throwaway744678 6y ago
        There are a lot of cities in the world, though.
  • dusted 6y ago
    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 assistant is so STUPID they didn't think about this thing the same way as I did, they should be fired, lowlife trash!" Yeah, first in class entitled assholery right there.
• Dobbs 6y ago
  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.
  • qayxc 6y ago
    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.
    • Dobbs 6y ago
      Hmm, maybe that is how I'm triggering it? Asking what time it is in "Salt Lake"? Thanks, I'll play with that and see if it makes Siri behave better.
  • spuz 6y ago
    Is that with Siri or something else?
• Sirikon 6y ago
  Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.
  • avip 6y ago
    I'm too lazy to clarify my thoughts, you're fired.
    • SirHound 6y ago
      Too lazy to clarify by "London" you don't mean London Ontario? Give me a break.
    • Veen 6y ago
      If you have to constantly "clarify your thoughts" because your assistant is incapable of basic inferences based on context and general knowledge, then they aren't likely to be much use as an assistant.
      • dustinmoris 6y ago
        Maybe GPS data and the fact that due to a pandemic there's a travel ban the actual intelligent answer is in fact "London, Canada" and only a stupid person would fail to see that? We can spin this all day long. The truth is, if you want a very specific answer, and you fail to ask a specific question, then you're the only one to blame.
        • Veen 6y ago
          How far would you take that though? If I say to my assistant "what time is it?" should I also specify that I mean the time at my current longitude and latitude. If I say "Could you please print this for me," must I specify to print it on the printer in my office and not one in Barcelona, using letter paper, in a font that isn't Comic Sans, and that it shouldn't be thrown in the trash right after it is printed. Or should I assume that a reasonably intelligent person can infer all that?
        • 6y ago
• jen20 6y ago
  I’ve always phrased the question as “What is the time in the UK” (as a British person living in the USA). It’s unclear to me whether my form of asking the question is because it’s the best way to get a “good” answer from Siri, though I don’t think it would ever occur to me to ask what the time is in London versus the last city I lived in (Bath) in the first place, since they’re always the same.
  • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
    Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK, so there's no point asking "What's the time in London" and "What's the time in Preston" because you know the answer is the same, but since America has 3 or 4 timezones (I'm not sure, I know it's at least three), American people intuitively specify the city, since "What's the time in the USA" is not valid
    • sacado2 6y ago
      > Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I don't really know how it works in the UK because I'm French, so let's take France instead. "What time is it in France?" usually means "in metropolitan France", but now let's say you're in northern Brazil, close to the border of French Guyane. When you say "what time is it in France", do you mean "metropolitan France across the ocean", or do you mean "the closest French department a hundred miles away"?
      • kjakm 6y ago
        >> And that's where things start to get fun, because there are actually several timezones in the UK if you include its dependencies. I think the UK only consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK has some control over aspects of the dependencies but they are not actually part of the UK.
        • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
• Hamuko 6y ago
  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 of "Frankfurt am Main, Germany".
  • nivenkos 6y ago
    I remember Deutsche Bahn's website used to do the same with Freiburg and Freiburg im Breisgau. Almost made that mistake once.
  • gruturo 6y ago
    My company (based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) had an online business travel reservation system which helpfully pre-filled the starting point of all new trips to Frankfurt, Kentucky (which is not even the right spelling of the city). I filed a request to NOT pre-fill the starting city to a place in Kentucky and got a polite but firm reply that this was the default list provided by the 3rd party online booking engine and cannot be customized. Sigh.
    • raverbashing 6y ago
      You might need to politely but firmly ask them to escalate this with the 3rd party provider, especially depending on your footing and monthly spends According to Wikipedia Frankfort, KY doesn't even have an airport so this is a double whammy of stupid on the part of the 3rd party
      • jen20 6y ago
        I had forgotten about this until just now but it wasn't so long ago that the Virgin Atlantic (a London, England-based airline) would autocomplete "London" (vs LHR) to "East London, South Africa" in the origin field despite them not flying there. That annoyed me around once a week when I used to fly a lot more.
• marius_k 6y ago
  You have to know the time in London Canada when you're king, you know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uio1J2PKzLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uio1J2PKzLI
• dusted 6y ago
  Okay, I knew I was stupid already, but if I was an assistant, and smart enough to know there was more than one London (which I've until recently not been), I'd have asked "Which one?" in case there was not enough context to make a guess. There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one.. Kinda like how I'm eternally sad when I get german results, just because my connection is from Germany, but I am Danish, sitting in Denmark and am usually NOT looking for the nearest biergarten (lies, I am, but we have none).
  • mcherm 6y ago
    Asking for clarification is a GREAT response. I'd be happy if a human assistant OR Siri were to respond that way.
    • koala_man 6y ago
      It sounds like a good idea until you realize how many interpretations any given question can have, and how many of them are extremely unlikely. "How far is Jupiter from the sun?" "Jupiter, Florida; or Jupiter the planet?" "How old is Donald Trump?" "There are 21 people with that name, do you mean ...?" "Call 911" "The emergency number or the English 90s boy band?"
  • Veen 6y ago
    You're right that some people want to know the time in London, Ontario. But most people who ask the time in London don't. In the absence of context, the right thing is to give the time in the UK. If more context is given: "What time is it in London, Ontario," then obviously it should give the time in Ontario, and perhaps remember that this person is an exception to the rule.
  • onion2k 6y ago
    There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one.. There will be a lot more people who are asking about the British London than people who are asking about their nearest London. Apple will be making far more people sad by defaulting to the local one. If Siri asked "Which London?" every time most people would get annoyed. What should happen from a UX perspective is that Siri should respond with "The time in London, UK, is..." which would inform the user that Siri is differentiating between different Londons, and that they need to specify a locality in order to narrow down the query to some other London if necessary. 99% of the time the user will get what they wanted first time, and the other 1% of the time the user will be informed that their query wasn't accurate enough.
• denster 6y ago
  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'll iterate on it even more -- it's hard to get this topic both right & make it easy to use / approachable. Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic? (date/time/locale handling) [1] I'm biased as a founder at https://mintdata.com https://mintdata.com, but thankfully our engineers set me straight on the subtleties :D
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    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).
    • teruakohatu 6y ago
      I think you underestimate newbie developers. The nightmare that is dates and times is something that you learn from experience, not at university.
      • globular-toast 6y ago
        Yes, I should say "experienced developer".
    • quickthrower2 6y ago
      “Human facing”? Any software worth it’s salt needs to deal with this stuff. Unless it’s a toy program. I quite enjoy Timezone stuff, perversely. Might be Stockholm?
      • globular-toast 6y ago
• kara_jade 6y ago
  If I ask Siri on my iPhone "What time is it in London?" here in Germany, it replies with the time of London, England.
  • huffmsa 6y ago
    Because it assumes you want to plan V2 rocket attacks.
  • DonCopal 6y ago
    Because it's closer than London, Ontario.
• lqet 6y ago
  Ranking and NLP aren't easy. If you are asking a slightly related question (for example, "What is the weather in London"), and if you are living at some place where the nearest major town is called London, but is not London in England, you would expect it to give you the weather in "your" London. However, it you are asking for the time in a particular city, then the ranking should of course consider whether the timezone of the city you asked for is different than your own - it makes no sense to ask for the time in a city which lies in your timezone. Then again, if the distance from your location to that other London is greater than a certain threshold, the question could imply that you actually do not know whether the city lies in the same timezone as your location. All these thresholds or ranking factors seem to come intuitively to humans (I would guess a good intuition for them is actually a sign of intelligence), but it seems to be incredibly hard to capture them in ranking. As others have pointed out, a solution here would be to make Siri more conversational. A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada).
  • CamperBob2 6y ago
    As others have pointed out, a solution here would be to make Siri more conversational. But that would make it almost as smart as an Infocom game from 1981. Something, something, doesn't scale, mumble, something...
  • amelius 6y ago
    The problem sounds a little like collaborative filtering. If you have a certain affinity with cities A,B,C, then you can compute the expected affinity with a city X by looking at the affinities other people have with X, and their affinities with A,B,C. Instead of looking at people, you can also scrape websites to get the relations. But here you may get a recursive problem because if a website speaks of "London", you might not know in advance which London they speak of.
  • ninkendo 6y ago
    > A simple "Which London?" could've removed the ambiguity and given Siri the opportunity to learn something about that particular person (that London, England is more important to him than London in Canada). IMO I would be very disappointed if Siri started asking clarifying questions at a significantly higher rate. Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her. I’d rather she just say the wrong thing (but make it clear that the answer is for a specific London, e.g. “The time in London Ontario is...”) and I can correct her. It’s the same number of conversational “turns”, but in the happy path when she actually gets it right the first time, it’s one-shot and done. It’s a lot harder to get signal on this for learning, but I feel like there are ways around this as well. (Maybe saying “thanks” can signal she got something right, and prefixing the next utterance with “no” could signal it was wrong...)
• craigsmansion 6y ago
  "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 casual of fact checking, and it's still up there with some sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction, and probably all because rms told Jobs they couldn't grant him an exception to turn gcc proprietary eons ago.)
  • smikhanov 6y ago
    What are RMS and ESR?
    • unfunco 6y ago
      Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond.
    • laumars 6y ago
      Old handles for the following individuals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • Veen 6y ago
    For the interested, here is Gruber's explanation, correction, and apology. https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_erroneous_allegation 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".
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jka 6y ago
  To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, UK. Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".
  • Veen 6y ago
    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).
    • jka 6y ago
      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..)
      • enlyth 6y ago
        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.
        • jka 6y ago
          Precisely. It's the user's context that matters, and that can change even for a particular individual at different times and locations. Remote, proprietary personal assistants tend to apply their own (generally unknowable and unaccountable, from the user's perspective) interpretation of the context.
        • 6y ago
• molteanu 6y ago
  The fact that this piece of "news" is front page is really stupid. There was a BBC piece yesterday about the condition in the Malakasa camp in Greece.[1] Some of our fellow brothers literally don't have anything to eat. And while it's 2020, we still fret about what browser is better (I bet half the globe doesn't even know what a browser is or doesn't care) or spend excessive amounts of time for yet a new color theme or a shiny new website that offers 2 new buttons that the other 50 websites don't. I think we failed. We were supposed to be the smarter ones. The best income (or close), the brightest minds, the new future, AI, the internet that connects everybody (how nicely did FB solved that). And here we are, gathered around the fire, having an intelligent conversation about nothing. https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cnx753je2q4t/europe-migrant-crisis https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cnx753je2q4t/europe-migrant-...
  • erikbye 6y ago
    > The fact that this piece of "news" is front page is really stupid. There was a BBC piece yesterday about the condition in the Malakasa camp in Greece ... HN is not a news website in the traditional sense, even though "news" is in the name. How is this not obvious? For what you are seeking you should go to reuters.com, you'd probably have better luck.
    • molteanu 6y ago
      Meaning, the rest of the world literally has other pressing problems than the ones the planet's most capable people are spending their days with. But I get it now. This new technology is not actually about saving the people, is about controlling them, regardless of what the motto of big tech might be. That quote from Dune is still right on track: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
      • kristiandupont 6y ago
        Your outrage rings pretty hollow as you are on Hacker News spending your time complaining rather than doing something about all the problems in the world.
• DangerousPie 6y ago
  It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is. Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close to "Hey Siri".
  • bnt 6y ago
    I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Even the basic “call home” works every 3rd time. I try it for a few minutes with every new iOS update only to see it’s still the same dumbster fire.
    • mxcrossb 6y ago
      When I lived in the United States I frequently used Siri while driving to setup the gps or change what music I was listening to. But indeed, ever since moving to a country with a nice public transportation system, I’ve had it disabled. There just isn’t a compelling use case. Meanwhile, my iPhone has gotten much smarter about adding meetings to my calendar, or guessing the person who is calling me. These seem like the real use cases for AI going forward.
  • michaelbrooks 6y ago
    I mostly use Siri to play Spotify, but most of the time she won't listen to me through my car's microphone. If she isn't working then I need to pull my phone out of my pocket and place it somewhere the phone can clearly hear me. Every once in a while she will decide to listen through my car, but it's very rare. I don't have Apple Car Play so not sure if that's a factor. Google has been far better and more consistent listening through my car even if it didn't get my query correct all the time, at least I could correct it without pulling my phone out.
  • chappar 6y ago
    I had never used an Apple product before the company which I joined recently gave me a MacBook Pro. I am really surprised how bad the product quality is. The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. Similarly the keyboard shortcut is random. Sometimes it opens the app, sometimes it does not. The laptop also gets very hot if you are not sitting in A/C. Not sure if it is this specific laptop or it is a general issue
• raverbashing 6y ago
  DuckDuckGo is usually guilty of this as well, usually picking up a less relevant city in the Americas rather than the more relevant city in Europe (when doing a generic query of "something" in "city")
• gjs278 6y ago
  siri is basically useless. I would never turn it on.
• dustinmoris 6y ago
  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 everything and making broad statements that if an assistant was to answer with anything but London, UK should get fired is something that someone would say, who IMHO should get fired. shrug Also, IMHO, if someone doesn't know that machines don't have human context and therefore doesn't know to ask their digital assistant "What is the time in London, UK" when they want to know the time in London, UK, then maybe they should get fired from their tech job. shrug
  • fireattack 6y ago
    But if none of these contexts you mentioned exist (which is the case here), what would an actual assistant answer?
    • dustinmoris 6y ago
      There was minimal context, location data from the watch. Maybe even the fact that there's a pandemic and he ain't gonna go to London, UK, but possibly Canada. However you spin it, someone will find a reason to find the answer "stupid", so the only one who is really stupid is the person who fails to ask a concrete question if they expect a concrete answer.
    • astrobe_ 6y ago
      If your company is located in Paris, Texas and you are in New York, ready to embark for a business to Paris, France and that you ask your assistant over the phone, out of the blue, "what is the temperature in Paris?" they would probably ask "which one?".
  • nixpulvis 6y ago
    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 never use these shitty voice assistants. If I'm going to be interacting with some pedantic robot, I generally want to be able to edit the text of my request. TLDR; voice assistants suck.
• frou_dh 6y ago
  As much as the big players have been pushing it, I still have zero desire to speak out loud to any computer. Probably going to get labelled as a mental disorder for feeling like this, in the coming decades.
• drstrangevibes 6y ago
  plot twist: I'm in London and asked Siri on my MacBook pro, "what time is it in Birmingham ?" Siri: "It's 5.33 in Birmingham Alabama"
• rland 6y ago
  I've read that Siri collects/sends home significantly less information about the user than its counterparts. It might just be that "getting it right" requires a complete violation of user privacy. I actually am perfectly fine with this.
  • swebs 6y ago
    Duckduckgo got it right, and it doesn't send any user data. Also, I think a system shouldn't have to know anything about you to know that you're not asking about London, Canada.
  • torgian 6y ago
    Agreed
    • tasssko 6y ago
      In a short period of time companies with databases of human activity will be finding new opportunities to profit off this data. Your insurance premiums, credit rating and even potential relationships will be influenced by a third party. When all you have to do is say 'Hey Siri what time is it in London, UK'.
  • jotm 6y ago
    Ah you may be right. Personally, I'd give it all of my information short of financial/state ID/name and maybe accurate location if it means having a real personal assistant.
• mojuba 6y ago
  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.
  • Slartie 6y ago
    > 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 there is a timezone border going through the state, of course. However, I obviously agree with your general point regarding the severe limitations of what we currently call "AI" and how little "intelligence" there actually is.
    • mojuba 6y ago
      > 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...
• mattlondon 6y ago
  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"
  • wickerman 6y ago
    Another irritating bit about this is that when I search for news about my country in my language, spanish (I live in London, the UK one Siri, not the american one) I still get a number of english language results first.
    • Zenst 6y ago
      Did you search in spanish or english? Also local environment options - was in in english or spanish. But the whole language and geographic association is one area in which many software experiences seem to get mixed results. My pet gripe is when I install software and it offer English (American) and no English(UK) option. Though less impacting that some language handerlings, like yourself.
  • AmericanChopper 6y ago
    For a lot of products, US sales are just worth so much more than sales from anywhere else, that it is reasonably common to not care much about the rest of the world. I’ve worked for a few companies that started out with a heavy focus on localization, but eventually realized it was just a massive waste of money.
    • nromiun 6y ago
      The issue isn't doing business in just America. The issue is the communication. Some services will have big banners like "Works everywhere flawlessly" and then (if you are lucky) in some dark corner of the FAQ there will be a tiny sentence, "Only available in US for now" (translation: it will never be available anywhere else). Even global companies like Google, Amazon do this.
• kjakm 6y ago
  Just a guess but when the author checks Siri on his phone it has access to GPS so is probably giving him the nearest 'London'. When he checks on HomePod it has no GPS so gives him the most common 'London'. Although it's infuriating and we want these tools to be much better I'm not sure how Siri can really ever know which London he wants. A human assistant without context is going to need to make a guess too and isn't going to be right with that guess 100% of the time. It would make much more sense to request "London, England".
• maxwellito 6y ago
  "Nilay Patel asked this of Siri on his Apple Watch." Am I the only one to be shocked by the situation? Isn't it the purpose of a watch?
• andy_ppp 6y ago
  I just bought a Homepod because the price has been reduced to a more normal amount, I think it started at £319 so it being £200 in the UK seemed quite good. I have to say the sound quality seems average to me - I admit it produces a lot of sound and bass from it's small frame but I like a bit of top end sparkle and it basically seems to have zero top end at all. As for Siri there is no point in asking it questions or talking to it for anything but changing volume and setting timers. A smart speaker this is not. I suppose Apple need to stop being afraid and build a damn search engine that actually understands queries from real people. I mean whatever they are trying to turn queries into responses is simply not working.
  • madeofpalk 6y ago
    > no point in asking it questions or talking to it for anything but changing volume and setting timers. A smart speaker this is not. For what it’s worth, that’s what anyone uses any “smart speaker” or assistant for. Settings timers/alarms, asking for the weather, and maybe starting music. Whether Siri is capable of more is a good question, but people don’t use them for any more.
    • empath75 6y ago
      They only use them for that because it sucks at everything else.
      • madeofpalk 6y ago
        I'm talking about all 'digital assistants' - Google's and Amazons. All people use them for is timers and weather.
• nathancahill 6y ago
  It's like the "Shirt Without Stripes" problem that was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925087
• trombonechamp 6y ago
  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.
  • a1a1a1a1a1a1 6y ago
    I certainly prefer DDG here. There is no ambiguity in "11:00 EST to UTC". EST is always UTC - 5, EDT is always UTC - 4, and ET could mean either depending on the time of the year. Google isn't making an arbitrary decision to deal with ambiguity it's ignoring the specificity in the query and reinterpreting it (as ET rather than EST)
  • ahyattdev 6y ago
    I'd argue that DuckDuckGo's behaviour is the correct one, but they should display a warning when the east cost is on EDT and someone requests conversion with EST. Maybe we will stop using daylight savings before the masses learn the difference between ET/EST/EDT.
    • kstrauser 6y ago
      Edge case: what would you do about Mountain Time? Check out this "fun" time zone map of Arizona where you could fly a straight line through 6 time settings in one hour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona#/media/File:AZTZ.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona#/media/File:AZ... The ET/EST/EDT question is reasonable because ET is heavily populated and behaves sanely (as far as I know). Other popular US time zones are... different.
      • ahyattdev 6y ago
        Interesting edge case. Perhaps we need something other than MST for Arizona (excluding Navajo Nation) if we want a lack of ambiguity. If only politicians knew how annoying dealing with time is for software developers!
• cpach 6y ago
  I tried Siri sometime in 2012 or so. Came to the conclusion that it was tuned for the US so I disabled it and never looked back :-p
• fouc 6y ago
  Siri, What Time Is It in London, UK?
• mattmanser 6y ago
  He says duckduckgo got it right, but that not true, he got lucky. When I ask DDG for "the weather in Nottingham", it often answers with the weather of a tiny town in the US, instead of the major city in the UK. Duckduckgo is also dumb.
  • dgellow 6y ago
    DuckDuckGo just delegates to other search engines.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Apple fan, but I had to disable siri after the false activation count surpassed the useful information count. They should figure out how to hire ‘alexa’ as the back-end like they hire ‘google’ for search, etc.
• mehrdadn 6y ago
  On that note, anybody know how often poor souls have booked flights to the wrong "Ontario, CA" because of this mess?
  • interestica 6y ago
    Would you trust Siri or any assistant to book a flight for you?
    • mehrdadn 6y ago
      Sorry, I think my comment was confusing. By "this mess" I wasn't referring to the assistant screwing up, but rather the searches themselves bringing up an unexpected location with a similar name, even if you typed them yourself.
• unangst 6y ago
  Siri needs to listen to a user’s response after presenting answers. The user hive mind would clearly flag problematic replies worthy of further examination.
• fridek 6y ago
  I now have most of my adult years learning how to construct a phrase that gets the right results for Google, and later Assistant. It got to the point where I'm certain it must be a headache for whatever team is trying to support natural language processing in these - all proficient users ask for some artificial gibberish and get where they want to be. Here comes my favourite brain freeze moment - recently my parents asked me to explain this to them. How do you construct a good search phrase? My brain blanked. I HAVE NO IDEA. It seems I have learned fluent Goonglish without noticing, and now can't explain the grammar or vocabulary of it.
  • calineczka 6y ago
    I would summarise it as: use separate keywords instead of sentences. "Change Light Bulb" instead of "how to change a light bulb". "Black Science Guy", "Kevin Durant height", "rails has_many api", etc... Recently Google got much better in understanding full sentences and there are tons of SEO optimized pages for certain phrases. Nevertheless, using keywords is what I imagine advanced users do.
    • Tarq0n 6y ago
      It also got much worse at keyword searches. It seems like the one capability came at the cost of the other.
  • maliker 6y ago
    I wonder if anyone is working on special languages for talking to voice interfaces. Maybe a reduced grammar would allow for better recognition accuracy and reliability. And we could get more helpful corrections. The problem reminds me of the difficulty of programming in applescript. In applescript, articles like "the" can be inserted optionally in the code, and there are lots of equivalent ways to write things, i.e. "if x equals y" is the same as "if x is equal to y". As a result I never remember the syntax, and error messages are less helpful.
    • jimktrains2 6y ago
      From my limited understanding, even in lojban, a constructed language with unambiguous grammar, you can have semantic ambiguity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
• purpleblues568 6y ago
  What time can I get shirt without stripes in London?
• anon269736 6y ago
  Try Googling for "Liverpool". It's a major UK cities with a metropolitan area of 2.2 million. Yet Google only gives you answers about the Liverpool football club.
  • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
    Same for Manchester, made doubly difficult by City.
• brownbat 6y ago
  Aza Raskin's Ubiquity was such a clear model of how to build voice interfaces the right way, and it wasn't even a voice interface. It was a bit of a launcher that tied APIs together on the web. Let users create and share small commands. Create a simple natural language for commands that are easy to program, extend, and remember, and narrow the scope of inputs the voice engine has to deal with. It was so beautiful and effective and just light years ahead of what we're getting. Microsoft gets a special mention for lost potential here. Their voice system in Windows could be a way to navigate the layered menus of the OS, but it is mostly focused on answering general queries. Voice is a great replacement for the program launcher, except it's not customizable, but that's about the extent of how much you can control the system with it. Let me do anything buried in the control panel, show me everything you know about a process when I ask, solve that first, then worry later about telling me how big the moon is. You make an OS, don't forget what that is.
• augstein 6y ago
  Apple really isn‘t on track regarding many important trends and even in areas they used to rock. - Virtual Assistants: After almost nine years of development, Siri still is only really reliable doing most basic tasks like setting timers or reminders.(1) - Smart Speakers: The HomePod is way too expensive and still the whole package really is no match for Amazons or Googles alternatives. Too inflexible and the "Smart" part is laughable (see above). While Amazons and Googles smart speakers are a common sight in many households today, Apple is sitting on the sideline for years. - Laptops: The debacle around their Butterfly Keyboard design was only resolved recently … after almost four years of massive problems. The new 2020 MacBook Air has a thermal design that is weird, to say the least and according to reviewers has heat problems despite being cooled actively, when comparable laptops are cooled passively.(2) The 2020 MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro 13" have screen-to-body ratios that are outdated in comparison with the competition.(3) The MacBook Pro 16" has speaker issues, display issues(4) and may overheat when used with an external display(5). - Desktop Computers: The Mac minis hardware is outdated and its price really isn't compelling. If you want to buy a proper external display from Apple to use with your MacBook or Mac desktop (mini/pro) and are no Hollywood Studio Video editor that needs a 5000$ XHDR display, you are out of luck. If you want to do Machine Learning and the likes on your new Mac and need NVidia CUDA support, you are out of luck.(6) The whole "modern CPU with macOS" topic is a sad one. - Webbrowser: When surfing the web with Safari you will encounter a rising number of websites that tell you to upgrade to a more modern browser like Chrome. Many web developers will tell you that "Safari is the new IE".(7) - TV: Apple TV pricing is not competitive and the Siri remote is so bad that people buy 3rd party replacement remotes.(8) 1) https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/alexa-vs-google-assistant-vs-siri-heres-which-is-best-based-on-living-with-all-3.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/alexa-vs-google-assistant-vs-... 2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2020/04/18/does-the-2020-macbook-air-have-an-overheating-problem-debate-rages-on/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2020/04/18/does-... 3) https://www.ultrabookreview.com/21772-laptops-small-thin-bezel/ https://www.ultrabookreview.com/21772-laptops-small-thin-bez... 4) https://www.laptopmag.com/news/uh-oh-apples-16-inch-macbook-pro-is-having-serious-speaker-and-display-issues https://www.laptopmag.com/news/uh-oh-apples-16-inch-macbook-... 5) https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/16-macbook-pro-gets-excessively-hot-when-using-external-display/16738 https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/16-macbook-pro-gets-excessi... 6) https://gizmodo.com/apple-and-nvidia-are-over-1840015246 https://gizmodo.com/apple-and-nvidia-are-over-1840015246 7) https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com 8) https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/12/9/21002605/apple-tv-remote-salt-swiss-tv-company-replacement-buttons-normal https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/12/9/21002605/a...
• brailsafe 6y ago
  I'll throw in a broader question that's derived from the apparent declination in praise toward Apple by famously apologetic writers/podcasters. What the hell do people buy new tech—and more specifically iPhones and iPads—for exactly? Where can the value proposition actually be made unless you're an illustrator or very frequent camera user? I have an older iPad, 2019 mbp, and One Plus 3 phone. They're fine, but not really any better than the crap I previously had, and struggle to see how newer stuff would markedly improve anything, save for apps working that stopped supporting my devices.
• mdemare 6y ago
  I have a HomePod and we're getting increasingly good at pronouncing French and Dutch artists with the accent of someone with no conception of foreign languages in order to get Siri to play them, e.g. "Gene Ferret" for Jean Ferrat. Apple Maps will happily butcher Dutch and French streetnames to the extent that we cannot recognize them at all. Siri will just make a random guess if it can't understand what I asked it to play. It's just so supremely awful at almost everything.
• gambiting 6y ago
  Yep, Siri is absolutely useless, I have no idea how people mention it it in the same breath as Alexa or Google Assistant(although these are also incredibly brain dead in their own ways). My favourite one with Siri was when I said "navigate to X, Birmingham" and it plotted a route(somehow??) To Birmingham, US(I live in the UK). Like, that's incredibly bad.
• artsyca 6y ago
  We've reached peak Daring Fireball
  • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    Think we passed that a good while ago to be honest. Used to be a good read a few years back but just comes across as damage control at this point. "Siri isn't very good" is hardly a controversial opinion in 2020.
• lajosbacs 6y ago
  Siri is also absolutely unusable if you use more than one language on a daily basis. Or if you have a lot of contacs with non-English names. Siri never gets this right and you always have to reverse-engineer a 'fake' English pronounciation of the said name.
• shwoopdiwoop 6y ago
  Asking what is “1000+5%” in MacOS Spotlight (command + space) has a different result than using the calculator or Siri. It doesn’t make it less confusing that spotlight is even showing a calculator icon when doing that! Spotlight: 1,000.05 Siri: 1,050 Calculator: 1,050 I wonder now what else I screwed up by using the spotlight shortcut.
• chx 6y ago
  Although Google Maps now fixed this, this was quite a bit of problem for the longest time. The place is Budapest, Hungary. Place names are unique within districts but not within the entire city. Entering Deák tér (tér meaning square) into Google Maps for the longest time has brought up a tiny speck of an insignificant location in the boondocks instead of the very center of the city where all three underground lines cross and the airport bus terminates. The thing is, the latter officially is called Deák Ferenc Tér... but noone alive calls it that.
• Jdam 6y ago
  My favorite Siri moment since like iOS 7 is when I ask Siri to turn off all alarms: ".......... one moment please ........... there's a problem with the network connection". No. There. Is. Not. In fact, all alarms always get deactivated. All other queries immediately before or after work fine. The failure rate when I ask that is no less than 100% for me. Just sad.
• addHocker 6y ago
  My personal theory is - that voice assistants are intentionally bad, to hide the amount of data collected, even though annonymized, from the people. They are a Trekkie dream, used by now as a clown to hide the ultimate information grab.
• wtmt 6y ago
  Siri is still bad (and perhaps indisputably the worst assistant), but the competition in other similar areas, where text is typed, don’t seem to be any better. When I’m on a browser and go to Bing or Google, they try to guess my location from the IP address and show news from/around the location. Move to maps, and suddenly it’s like using a product from a totally different company that wants to avoid using IP address for geolocation (maybe because someone didn’t like it for some other purpose). Start typing a street name and the autocomplete list would above a bunch of places in the US (it’s almost always the US) until I finish typing the city name (and sometimes the state or country too). Goes to show how poorly these services are designed.
• knolan 6y ago
  Siri is particularly dumb in this regard. Even something as simple as ‘play again’ will not always simply repeat a track. The inconsistency is infuriating. There are many more examples. Apple demoed the ability to ask for songs by asking Siri to ‘play that song from Top Gun’, which doesn’t work anymore. On a somewhat related note, DuckDuckGo can be particularly bad at local search. I live in Ireland and country search is simply broken returning Australian sites over Irish sites. I have to qualify every search with Ireland or Dublin to get it to be anyway useful.
• trashtester 6y ago
  I'm not surprised that Siri gets things like this wrong, unlike every traditional search engine. Each text based search engine returns more than one possible response, and if they return the wrong answer first, they can monitor how often people click on other answers, and use that to continously train their engine. Apple does not have that source of training data. However, the fact that so many people here defend the result due to "context" is a bit interesting. I would think that from both a technical and business point of view it should be clear what that there is only one correct result of the query given. I would be surprised if more than 5% of people making the query world wide (or in the US for that matter) wide would be interested in anything but the time in London, UK. Is there some kind of Stockholm syndrome involved?
  • amznthrowaway5 6y ago
    > I'm not surprised that Siri gets things like this wrong, unlike every traditional search engine. Each text based search engine returns more than one possible response, and if they return the wrong answer first, they can monitor how often people click on other answers, and use that to continously train their engine. Apple does not have that source of training data. Amazon doesn't have that either. Google Assistant is the best when it comes to answering questions
• kinnth 6y ago
  Siri on Apple watch is the biggest piece of shit i've ever used. The number of time it chirps up for no apparent reason and answers a irrelevant question happens daily. Apple make nice stuff. They suck at big data.
• hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  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 time is it in London, England?" It reminds me of someone who commented that "there must not be any black people who work at Apple" because it pronounced "Malcolm X Blvd" as Malcolm 10 Blvd. I mean, if anything, just appreciate how amazing humans are at differentiating these ambiguities.
  • recursive 6y ago
    Just because it's hard to implement right doesen't mean Apple should get a pass. I mean, they aren't forced to create a voice assistant by regulation. If they can't make a good one, (and this applies to Amazon and Microsoft too) they should have just left it in the lab until they can.
    • hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      > they should have just left it in the lab until they can. Totally disagree, because the only way these assistants get better is with real-world usage (which is why I can definitely agree that one should wonder why Apple isn't improving as fast as the competition). It was only a couple years ago that using Google Assistant was an extremely frustrating experience. I'd say it got about 5-10% of my words wrong, which meant it got my intent wrong about 25-35% of the time. These days I find its accuracy uncanny - it almost never makes a mistake with most of my "standard" queries. No way it could have gotten that good without real-world feedback and data.
      • jordanpg 6y ago
        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 here, these are serious comments about absurdly bad UX.
• dougwit 6y ago
  > At least when most computer systems are wrong they’re consistently wrong. I disagree.
• ubermonkey 6y ago
  Interesting. I can see how the basic algorithm might go "I've been asked for the time (or temp or whatever) in cityname. Citynames are routinely reused globally; what is the closest such cityname?" But that fails completely when you get to names like London (or Paris or Moscow or Cairo). But it happens with people, too. I'm from Mississippi, though I haven't lived there since I left for college. I now live in Houston. At a family reunion many years ago, I ran into a cousin I hadn't seen since we were kids. She asked where I was living, and I told her. "Oh, isn't it terrible about that wreck?" she asked. Baffled, I asked for more information. "Oh, you know, that wreck over on 406!" I did not know. "I'm sorry, Houston's really huge. I don't know what wreck you mean." "Oh, did you mean you live in Houston, TEXAS? I thought you meant Houston, MISSISSIPPI!" I was, at the time, about 30. I grew up in that state, and lived there until I went to college. And until that moment, I had never even HEARD of Houston, Mississippi (a metropolis, it turns out, of about 3600 people in the misbegotten northeast corner of the state).
  • gmac 6y ago
    It just feels like what is the closest such city name is pretty obviously an insufficient test. To approximate what a human would do, one would presumably want to start by ranking places on a range of dimensions: * nearest * biggest (or maybe size category: big city, city, town, village) * how many times user has asked about this place before * how recently user last asked about this place * ... If most/all these rankings put the same place in the top spot, go for it! Otherwise, ask the user for clarification.
    • netsharc 6y ago
      I wonder if there are Chinese cities with names close to major world cities. Paris has 2.15m people, its metropolitan area has 12.x million. A medium sized city im China has more than that. If by coincidence it's also named Paris, getting that as the search result would be annoying.
    • ubermonkey 6y ago
      Oh, I absolutely agree. But I can see how that might have come in as a first-assumption that was never revised. Which, if you think about it, is probably a huge class of bugs industry-wide.
• Zenst 6y ago
  Last night I asked Amazon Alexa to clap for NHS, darn thing started singing a song about science - well embarrassing when was expecting a loud clap to join in the chorus of neibours as done my wrist in and yet no, it started singing some song about science loudly and yeah, don't even want to think what my neibours thought if they heard that. Still could of been worse.
• smellsdonkey 6y ago
  Not necessarily on topic but my biggest gripe with voice assistants is that they work like a web search. You can ask what the state of the world is NOW but you can get them to let you know when things happen. I want "Alexa, let me know when XXX is having a concert nearby" or "Alexa, tell me when XX is on sale". That's what I really want.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    Things like this would be killer. These are things a real human assistant could easily do and are deceivingly difficult for a computer.
• bgentry 6y ago
  The craziest and most confusing behavior of Siri for me is: Sometimes you can ask a question and watch it be perfectly transcribed in real time, but then receive a nonsensical answer from it. Ask the exact same question immediately after on the same device, transcribed exactly the same way, and get the correct answer. Where does such unpredictability come from? How can Siri transcribe the words correctly but fail to deliver the right answer?
  • objclxt 6y ago
    > 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 be deterministic, the input data between two seemingly identical queries could vary quite a bit. For instance, Siri almost certainly has context around the previous questions you've asked. It would be reasonable to assume that if an assistant received two identical questions back-to-back the initial answer was wrong. In that scenario, the assistant might decide to use the a different answer (perhaps one that had a lower ranking) in an attempt to get it right.
    • bgentry 6y ago
      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.
      • MereInterest 6y ago
        Maybe some overly aggressive A/B testing?
• ycombonator 6y ago
  They are busy making TV shows.
• totaldude87 6y ago
  Did it ever got out of BETA? it feels like , different years same story.. heck one guy sued Apple over siri ad in 2013.. https://www.cultofmac.com/215169/why-is-siri-still-in-beta/ https://www.cultofmac.com/215169/why-is-siri-still-in-beta/ the real race is between Google and Amazon for personal digital assistant. Guess even cortana can beat siri day in day out.
• p4bl0 6y ago
  They had the same problem with Paris when Apple released the version of OS X that introduced widgets (was it 10.4 aka Tiger?). In their demo there were screenshots with the weather widget set to Paris and showing it will be sunny all week long. That's what tickled me. And indeed, "Paris" was equivalent to "Paris, Texas" for the weather widget.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• lordgrenville 6y ago
  A commenter here felt the need to clarify "Manchester" the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263165 So not sure if it's true that a human would automatically assume London, England - especially if you're in the US or Canada.
• jvolkman 6y ago
  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 city over fixed the problem. So I started a binary search and eventually found that the issue was limited to my ~10x20 block Seattle neighborhood - basically the outline shown when I search for its name in Google Maps. I then also realized that it applied to weather queries on my phone as well, but since the phone uses GPS rather than a specific location setting, I could only reproduce the broken and working behaviors by crossing one of the neighborhood boundary streets. Turns out it was some long-standing configuration issue with Knowledge Graph's entry for my neighborhood, and some recent code change in location-based weather queries began butting heads with it. Luckily I worked at Google at the time and was able to track down and pester people that could help fix the issue.
  • OkGoDoIt 6y ago
    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.
    • jvolkman 6y ago
      Yes. In this instance you're probably correct.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Deimorz 6y ago
      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 people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps. I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.
• nimbix 6y ago
  Another huge problem for these assistants is unusual band names. I have yet to successfully convince either Siri or Google Assistant to "play Einstürzende Neubauten".
  • Asooka 6y ago
    Even worse when the band name isn't written with latin characters to begin with.
• jussij 6y ago
  This page says there are 29 places around the world named London: https://geotargit.com/called.php?qcity=London https://geotargit.com/called.php?qcity=London That suggests to me if the answer was not the obvious one and only London England, then the only sensible answer should have been a question asking which other London did you mean?
  • kgin 6y ago
    It’s true, but if you had to pick an arbitrary London, it seems like either largest item closest would make sense. It’s weird it’s neither.
• underbluewaters 6y ago
  "Hey Siri, set a timer for 5 minutes" 90% of the time works fine, and it's essentially all I use Siri for. It's very convenient when cooking and my hands are dirty. But 10% of the time I get something along the lines of... "I'm sorry, but you don't have the Timer app installed". "I'm sorry, but you don't have the Timer app installed". "I'm sorry, but you don't have the Timer app installed". "I'm sorry, but you don't have the Timer app installed". It's infuriating because I know Siri is dumb so I use the same exact simple phrases to avoid confusion. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It always transcribes the command accurately though! I've actually lost my temper and smashed an Apple Watch before over this. This is in my house, on a very reliable network, always with my phone within a reasonable distance.
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  I am more likely to be given directions to a thousand miles away than to the only restaurant in my hometown with the word “Whatever” in the name (that’s in my map favorites, too).
• martin-adams 6y ago
  I was completely confused this week asking Google for the "uk bank holiday". It answers it with no the in 3 days time, but the one next year. Screenshot: https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1263578310266679296?s=20 https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1263578310266679296?...
• squeaky-clean 6y ago
  Among a bunch of other services, the company I work for offers a database of locations and travel/tourism based info. Airports, attractions, etc, and I'm the lead on that. Twice over 5 years I've gotten phone calls involving our CEO and a higher-up at an airline who was absolutely furious that we had been advertising London International Airport (YXU) as somewhere in Canada for a long time. I still remember how funny it was having to tell them to look up YXU on Wikipedia, and that they probably meant to search for "London Heathrow Airport" (LHR). I wonder if we still get those angry calls, but now people know the answer before it reaches me. I've also made a similar mistake years ago. I was excitedly looking for a nonexistent building in the University of Miami (Florida), because I found online that the Miami University had a star-gazing club open to the public that met at 10pm once a month. Miami University is in Ohio... :(
• zeveb 6y ago
  > 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. If I had a factory in London, Kentucky and I worked in Seattle, and I never did business in the UK, then I very well might mean that one. But no, I probably would never mean just the closest London. This is a hard, hard problem. Names can indicate multiple entities, and it is context-dependent which they mean. Men get this wrong all the time; I see no reason why machines would be better, and plenty of reason that they will be worse in the near-term.
• hi41 6y ago
  I have a Sony UHD TV with Android which comes preloaded with Google Assistant which support voice search. I wanted to watch a movie and I did a voice search for that movie. I expected to get a list of apps where I can watch it - Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+. Instead I was presented with a list of shops few miles away. I found this interface very bad. I search on TV to watch a series/movie. Why would the Google Assistant give a list of shops nearby? That may be useful if I open Google Maps and search for that but on TV most people search to watch something on TV and choose the app that streams it. Why do smart companies like Google create such pathetic interfaces.
  • bitwise-evan 6y ago
    Likely because Google Assistant did not know it was running on a tv. It's probably the generic assistant that comes with Android. Not sure I would consider that pathetic. Tuning all the intricacies of the Assistant for each application seems like a ton of work.
• arihant 6y ago
  I grew up in Lucknow, India (a tier 2 city with around 3MM people at the time) and had multiple assistants think I meant Lucknow, Ontario — a town with population of a 1000 people.
  • jessriedel 6y ago
    Having been to London, Ontario, I can confirm that it also doesn't have quite the same heft as London, England :)
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  This worked fine on every iOS, iPad OS, macOS and watchOS device I have. I’ll try later on tvOS and report back if I can reproduce anything of what Mr. Fireball claimed.
  • wil421 6y ago
    I can also confirm iOS, MacOS, WatchOS, and my AppleTV picked London, England.
• swagatkonchada 6y ago
  Gold content here for Siri's PM team if they are watching.
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  Literally not reproducible. A lot of bluster over nothing.
  • dointheatl 6y ago
    I just tried it and my watch gave me the time in London, KY. I live in Atlanta.
• acwan93 6y ago
  It seems like this would always be a hard task, especially once you get down to the smaller cities. Shortly after Siri launched, I would be sitting in the Bay Area asking Siri “What’s the weather like in Pasadena?”. Siri would return the weather in Pasadena, TX, not Pasadena, CA. The reason I could come up with why Siri returned the Houston suburb instead of the LA suburb? Pasadena, TX has a higher population (149K vs 141K), so it returned the one that had the higher population, even though the California one was much more prominent. Seems like Gruber’s experience led to an overcompensation. It’s similar to a bug where I was actually in Pasadena, CA and asking for weather in Santa Barbara, and Siri would return Santa Barbara Island, not Santa Barbara, CA, even though the island was closer to me as the crow flies.
• grecy 6y ago
  I live in Western Canada, and whenever I tell someone my sister lives in London, they guess I mean Ontario. I mean the UK.
• wojo1206 6y ago
  This doesn't apply to Chicago for some reason. Siri got it right here. We must live far from any local London city.
• flatline 6y ago
  > Why in the world would you get a completely different answer to a very simple question based solely on which device answers your question? Because the phone has location services enabled and the pod does not? Just a guess but they are certainly operating under different contexts.
• azangru 6y ago
  I just asked Google "How many cities named London are there". Google told me that there are three cities named London in America. It completely ignored London, England as well.
• reiichiroh 6y ago
  There’s a joke that every place name followers by a pause and Ontario is made worse.
• danielrhodes 6y ago
  The problem with these devices is they don't ask for more context, like a human might. Sometimes they use telemetry for context, but most don't seem to keep any memory of previous questions asked. If Siri asked: did you mean London, Canada or London, England, and then perhaps weighted that response in the future, that would probably end up creating a feedback loop where it would get quite good. In the case of Siri, Apple has said they are very committed to privacy, and this might preclude this type of solution.
• human 6y ago
  The problem here is context. I can’t imagine an algo that would get it correct 100% of the time on the first run. An actual assistant would learn from and adapt to you. Making a mistake is ok but you can’t repeat the mistake over and over. If you meant London, UK you should be able to say: “No Siri, I meant London, UK.” And that would be the last time Siri is wrong here. Sadly, this is not the current state of AI.
• parliament32 6y ago
  The problem with Siri is that it's always tried to be too smart for its own good. Remember back when asking it tried to force-feed everything through wolfram alpha? https://i.imgur.com/68pLeIQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/68pLeIQ.jpg
• markkat 6y ago
  The mistake Gruber is making here is that DDG, Google, Alexa, and Bing did not "get it right". Their answer wasn't wrong, but it's not because they "got it". They never "got it" any more than Siri didn't. AI is a story we tell ourselves.
  • parliament32 6y ago
    Of course they "got it". When any human says a context-less "London", except maybe people literally in London ON and surrounding areas, they obviously mean the London. It's a little human communication nuance but understanding "what I mean" vs bare "what I say" is a huge part of getting AI-ish assistants to be useful.
    • markkat 6y ago
      Google, DDG, Alexa, and Bing don't "get it", meaning they don't shared a contextual framework that resembles our own. These algorithms mimic a shared contextual framework, but it is mimicry. That is the fundamental reason why they don't know how they are wrong when we decide they are.
• thebouv 6y ago
  Siri is terrible. "Call mom" sometimes calls my mom, who is in my favorites (I have 4 people in favorites: mom, wife, daughter, brother). Sometimes it decides to call "wife's mom" Sometimes it says "which mom" then lists "mom, wife's mom" Mom, literally the word mom, is in my favorites. I use it almost daily. And yet, Siri doesn't remember this, doesn't create relevancy, it doesn't even decide "Let's look at Favorites first". :/
  • KMnO4 6y ago
    FWIW, if you never refer to "wife's mom" as "mom", you can change the required pronunciation in the contact details. Then, Siri will only activate if you say "Call wiyefesmom"
• yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  I must admit I have grown weary of appending “the country” to every Google search I make related to Georgia. Also, for a long time, searching Google for “London bridge” returned an incorrectly labelled photo of Tower Bridge as its top result. Genius.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    To be fair, most people think the tower bridge is the London Bridge, not just a London bridge.
    • yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
      Well yes, but surely Google showing the wrong information is not helping. I can understand if the argument is that Google is trying to show what the user intended, and they had correctly surmised that the user is wrong. They do a good job of this with misspellings. Perhaps they ought to do something similar in this case too? [user Googles ‘London bridge’] Google: Showing results for Tower Bridge (click here to instead only show results for London Bridge).
• justinsaccount 6y ago
  Where would you draw the line though? "What is the weather in Manhattan" probably means NYC, unless you are near Kansas...
  • jldugger 6y ago
    But wildcats already know they need to suffix that one with a state qualifier.
• chris_f 6y ago
  Search relevance is incredible difficult, especially when there is not enough information provided in the query and there are multiple "correct" answers. Someone is always going to be disappointed. You can make the argument in this case that +90% of users would find that London, England is a better answer, but there are millions of these types of queries. In a recent example, I was using my favorite search engine and showed someone a query for "toaster" where the top results was an infobox describing what a toaster was. They thought the relevance for the query was hilariously wrong saying, "everyone already knows what a toaster is, I want results for buying a toaster". IMO I thought the results were perfect based on the query. Neither of us were wrong. The expectation for search tools has dramatically shifted where many people expect them to have oracle like qualities.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • smacktoward 6y ago
    > Search relevance is incredible difficult, especially when there is not enough information provided in the query and there are multiple "correct" answers. Someone is always going to be disappointed. Sure, but in that case you go with the answer that will be the correct answer for the most users. Which in the example in TFA would almost certainly be London in the United Kingdom, not some other London in Kentucky or Canada or what have you. You'll end up disappointing those users who actually want to know the time in those Londons, but there are going to be a lot fewer of those.
    • chris_f 6y ago
      I agree, this is a fairly clear cut example. But what do you do in situations that are closer to split on people agreeing what the right answer is, or there are 10 answers that could be relevant to the same percentages of people. A query leading to the single relevant answer to the user 100% of the time is impossible. There could be a mechanism for the system to get additional information when needed, but that also has some user experience issues. These are all problems that are most likely solvable to a degree though. On a side note, I also don't think Siri is very good compared to some of the other voice assistants.
• DenisM 6y ago
  I submit that we don't have the wisdom to tell an overfit solution from a genuine decent work in progress with rough edges. Worse yet, overfitting makes for nicer demos quicker, so genuine work is always at a disadvantage.
• dilly_li 6y ago
  Meanwhile, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla self-driving technology will be worth more than $100,000.
• noisy_boy 6y ago
  I mean I get the complications but if I'm living _that_ close to London OH, chances are that I won't be asking the time because it'll probably be same as my own timezone. If I am living multiple timezones away, then I probably want to know about London, England.
• kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
  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 and the text transcript on the screen says "FRONT DOOR" hey Siri is my FRONT DOOR locked' Siri: WTF are you talking about? You don't have a FRONT DOOR. "Hey Siri is my door locked" Siri: Your FRONT DOOR is locked. Google and Alexa handle things flawlessly.
  • 0zymandiass 6y ago
    I don't know if it works there, but siri couldn't understand one of my contacts names When it read back super incorrectly from an alias, I said something to the effect of "could you pronounce that correctly?" and it asked me to say it Since then, it's understood that person's name. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It really needs to expose the option to train those easily
    • LeoPanthera 6y ago
      Indeed, you can say "That's not how you say that" to correct its pronunciation of any name.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • cachvico 6y ago
      There is a "Pronunciation" field in the contact where you can spell out how a name is pronounced. This article clears everything up, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8116586 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8116586
  • reaperducer 6y 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.
• ngngngng 6y ago
  There's a Woodland Hills in Utah and a Woodland Hills in California. If you ask Google what the weather is in Woodland Hills, it will ALWAYS give you the weather for California. Even if your current location is Woodland Hills, Utah and even if your address is set to Woodland Hills Utah in your Google account or Google home.
  • sangnoir 6y ago
    Why would you need to specify your location? You can just ask "How is the weather?" or "What will be the weather like tomorrow?"
    • ghaff 6y ago
      Maybe you're traveling and want to know what the weather is at home.
  • flurdy 6y ago
    I live in Alton in Hampshire in England. A town of 20,000ish people. To be fair Google (Maps etc) tend to get the correct Alton, but a lot of mickey mouse site often thinks I am in Alton, Shropshire, a tiny village next to a more famous theme park, Alton Towers. Which is very annoying setting filters job sites as I am never sure which Alton it thinks I am in, local ads that don't make sense etc. Worse there is an Alton, New Hampshire, which confuses even Google sometimes. Even worse, Apple seems sometimes confused where I am as I have twice woken up to see a tornado warning on my IOS lock screen in the mornings. I live pretty far from any decent tornados. Unfortunately, I have been too sleepy to prevent myself from unlocking the screen before I remember to screenshot it.
• cristi201 6y ago
  Siri doesn’t know that my wife it’s also my spouse. Enough said.
  • ericlewis 6y ago
    you can set that up in the contacts app.
• killion 6y ago
  The fact that there isn't a feedback mechanism to let the Siri team know that it responded incorrectly tells me everything I need to know. Until they have real metrics around how often Siri fails they will continue to think that their correct response rate is great.
  • thenewwazoo 6y ago
    I'm just waiting for my toddler to start repeating "Hey Siri, nobody was talking to you."
    • krallja 6y ago
      My preschooler does that whenever I’m working with a tool that requires me to bend my wrist backwards and the watch-Siri activates. “Sorry, could you say that again?” Nobody asked for you to interrupt my chopping, Siri.
  • rockinghigh 6y ago
    Companies usually hire editors to manually annotate the quality of the algorithms on anonymized samples. They don't need direct user feedback to gather quality metrics. You also can't tell which step failed in the pipeline: speech recognition, query understanding, or the actual search.
    • jimktrains2 6y ago
      Why can't you know which step? It's their system..they can build as much tracing as they want into it. Why would editors make user feedback any less valuable? It's hubris to think it's not.
  • giarc 6y ago
    They likely don't need the manual feedback as they would be able to tell that someone asked the same question twice in a row, and then look at the data to see what the issue was.
• austinl 6y ago
  I've returned to manually calling people manually from the Contacts app because of how frustrated I'd get every time I'd try to make a phone call through Siri. The whole exchange takes about 20 seconds: "Hey Siri, call John Smith" Siri: "Did you mean John Smith?" "Yes John Smith" Siri: "Calling John Smith"...
  • kstrauser 6y ago
    I had a boss, Joe Chan. My wife is Jen. A nonzero portion of the time, I'd say something like "Hey Siri, text Jen I love you" and would get back "OK, texting Joe Chan I love you". I've texted Joe approximately never. I've texted my wife 8 times this morning. If there was any ambiguity at all, could you, uh, optimize for the contact I actually contact?
• SiliconMage 6y ago
  There's an old episode of All in the Family where Archie Bunker loses his Christmas Bonus for shipping something to the wrong London, 1971 and way before Siri or computers. This ain't a new problem. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0509842/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0509842/
• sidcool 6y ago
  Siri is not an AGI (yet?). And when people say "Siri is stupid", they are talking about the engineers creating Siri. And I am sure Apple engineers are not stupid.
• konschubert 6y ago
  When I ask Siri to navigate to a contact, she won’t do it unless the contact has an address, even if the contact is tracked on Find My. You’d think that after all those years Apple could have made the investment to program this feature, no?
• kempbellt 6y ago
  >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 without educating them in the ways of how your mind works to create better efficacy between you two, then you don't deserve employees. Context...means...everything. People make the most basic of mistakes all the time. Teach them the preferred outcome, and move on. Making a fuss over it shows your lack of maturity and ability to lead anyone. Reminds me of kids who are in the "in" making of kids who aren't. "What??? You've never seen Star Wars??? GUYS! Timmy's never seen Star Wars! I bet he doesn't even know who Obi Wan is. What an idiot..." smh...
  • ianferrel 6y ago
    I'm with the author here. There's a certain amount of base knowledge that not having is just indicative of general cluelessness. It's like if you asked someone to get you a cup of coffee and they came back with a measuring cup of coffee beans, it's not that you can't educate them that you actually wanted them to grind the beans and filter some water through it. It's that they're going to screw up lots of other stuff too. You probably wouldn't fire them after the first time, but do you really think someone who makes that mistake won't just be more trouble than help to work with?
    • kempbellt 6y ago
      >You probably wouldn't fire them after the first time, but do you really think someone who makes that mistake won't just be more trouble than help to work with? I've worked with some clueless people. All of which were capable of learning with some instruction and guidance. Had a cameraman once forget to press "record" at the beginning of an event - nearly costing me a client. I was pissed at the ignorance of the mistake, but I ate a lot of the frustration, mentioned that I need him to occasionally ensure the camera is on, and recording during events and...it never happened again. I wouldn't fire someone for bringing me a cup of coffee beans instead of a brewed cup of coffee. I would let them go if they kept doing it after being provided instruction. As an aside, I never ask anyone to make me coffee unless they are a trained barista, and even they make drinks that aren't what I want on occasion. Though I see your point, there is way too much preference in how to make an ideal "cup of coffee" for this to really be comparable, in my opinion.
• markstos 6y ago
  There is a known list of "Global Cities" which should be treated exceptionally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city The world is on a first name basis with these cities, and AI should know to treat them exceptionally.
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  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 her stupid.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    This is how people treated Siri when it came out. It's been nine years since, so it should really not be something that is OK now. (Aside: are there actually people who grew up in the United States who aren't aware of the significance of Boston, Massachusetts, arguably the nexus of the American Revolution?)
  • scrozier 6y ago
    Thanks for this. The tone of this article was off-putting to me. The world doesn't really break down into "us" and "stupid people."
  • casefields 6y ago
    If she were still doing that a decade later what would your response be? We choose to hire Siri/Alexa/etc. At some point there's to be a baseline of good enough or else you fire them.
    • dreamcompiler 6y ago
      Yeah, point very much taken. Agreed.
  • grayclhn 6y ago
    Note that she didn't book you a flight to the nearest Boston either.
  • smabie 6y ago
    I mean, you can become smarter. She does sound stupid, but fortunately, maybe she can change that.
• coffinbirth 6y ago
  Once I asked Siri for the current calendar week and got the answer 'I don't understand your question'. I reworded my question several times, still without success. At best it wanted to make a new entry in the calendar app. In most possibly useful cases it simply fails.
• Thorbassen 6y ago
  Apple should just integrate Google Assistant, it's second to none.
• node-bayarea 6y ago
  Siri SUCKS!!!
• node-bayarea 6y ago
  Google AI is AMAZING! Siri is Dumb!
• stblack 6y ago
  List of cities that are SMALLER IN POPULATION than London, Ontario. Tampa Wichita Cleveland Anaheim Honolulu Saint Paul St. Louis I think the author doesn't grasp the depth of his own pettyness.
• varbhat 6y ago
  Side question. Do you use Siri/GA/Alexa/Alternatives for something serious? (which can cost you something if not done properly)
• wilg 6y ago
  A while ago I videoed three particularly silly Siri bugs: • Not knowing Billie Eilish on some devices only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMkZGO5iFKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMkZGO5iFKw • A fascinating interpretation of two and a half months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giq7bQl-jk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giq7bQl-jk0 • Playing the wrong song for no explicable reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yj6rroaXL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yj6rroaXL0 They really need to get a handle on this!
  • amerine 6y ago
    Amazing examples. Thanks for the videos.
• jchook 6y ago
  I recently asked Siri for directions. Between two matching locations, she picked the one 30 miles away instead of the one 2 miles away.
• lesinski 6y ago
  During transcription, Siri frequently thinks that "exclamation point" -- the common punctuation -- is me trying to add the phrase "excavation point," a phrase nobody ever says.
• monksy 6y ago
  Time for you to get a watch. - I'll see myself out.
• emiliosic 6y ago
  It's likely the closest 'London' near the user. Side effect of living in former British colonies.
  • rconti 6y ago
    Siri gets it right for me, even though I am probably 6000 miles from London, England. Maybe it's because I am not near enough to another London for the algorithm to make the assumption that I am talking about a "local London" and instead figures since they're all pretty far away, I probably mean the more well-known London. Or maybe because I've traveled to London England but not any other Londons (That I can remember) Or possibly because I have London, England in my World Time app.
• russellbeattie 6y ago
  I didn't see any New Englanders in this thread point out this sign in Maine yet [1]. I grew up in northern New Hampshire and many the towns near me were named after European places like Berlin and Milan (purposefully mispronounced after WWII). Much of the south part of the state is named after cities in England: Manchester, Dover, Portsmouth, etc. Close by is Portland, Maine, which is always confused with the one in Oregon unless you've lived there. This is one of those AI contextual things which have no great solution until the machines can read our minds, or get a lot better at learning about us. Then, of course, privacy advocates will lose their minds. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/China_Sign.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/China_Si...
• l0b0 6y ago
  There's a lot of context that goes into this question. Almost all grown-ups understand time zones at least enough to know that somewhere far away (at the other side of the equator or longitudinally) is likely to have a different time of day at any given time. On the flip side, we understand that somewhere sufficiently close, like the next town over, is at least in general unlikely to have a different time of day. So for an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) to choose between London, a few kilometres away, and London, UK, would depend on at least these factors: - How important is either London in your life? If you commute to London, Canada, then it's going to be infuriating to always get answers about London, UK. - Is the answer for London, Canada different from "What time is it?"? If it's the same, then there's at least a fairly good chance that you knew it was in the same time zone, and you didn't intend to ask about it. - Asking about the time is fundamentally different from asking about a whole lot of different things. Let's say you ask for the biggest manga book shop in London, which London depends on whether you're currently near any London, whether you've been to any specific London before, whether you've got tickets to go to a conference in London, whether London near you is even big enough to have a manga book shop. All in all, no, it's not obvious that "London" always means the globally most important London.
  • sbarre 6y ago
    Even us folks who live in Ontario refer to London in Canada as "London Ontario" when talking about it, unless it's extremely contextually obvious that you _don't_ mean London, UK. So yes, it is obvious to us humans who have London Ontario in our lives that "London" refers to London UK.
    • l0b0 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people living close to London Ontario who refer to it as simply "London", but that's besides the point. We are nowhere near being able to algorithmically take into account everything every single person considers "obvious" in AI. Software today, whether it's marketed as "AI", "expert system" or other IMO bullshit term, is absolutely nowhere near what a non-developer, non-marketing person would describe as such.
• starpilot 6y ago
  If you type "16 oz in cups" in duck duck go, it currently gives 15 imperial fl oz is 1.894 US cups. If you change it to US fl oz, it is then 1.972 US cups, when most people would expect 2.0 US cups. This is because there are US nutritional fl oz, and US customary fl oz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)#Legal_cup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)#Legal_cup. This sifting through of different "oz" is highly contextual, but Google gets it right.
• schrodinger 6y ago
  Interestingly, if you reply with just “no, London England” it does remember you were asking about time and gives the correct answer. However, the next time you ask for time in London, you’re back to Canada.
• dehrmann 6y ago
  Reminds me of a bug I kept having to resurrect at Spotify: the first result for "Billie Jean" was an admittedly good cover by The Civil Wars, but the result was clearly wrong. And it wasn't a case of "Man Who Sold the World," "Hurt," or "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" where the cover is arguably the definitive version. Turns out search is hard. Oh, and if you search for "Billy Jean?" Still broken.
  • wrsh07 6y ago
    At some point I wonder if business incentives are a problem Eg does Spotify pay more to play the original than the one by The Civil Wars? If so, how much money are they saving by such "bugs"? And if not, how is popularity (use an objective ish metric, eg wiki page length) not a major feature?
• wpowiertowski 6y ago
  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 one<" Me: "Siri you're useless" Siri: "That's not nice" Me: "Could be but it's true"
• NightlyDev 6y ago
  Me: "Hey Google, set a timer for 15 minutes." Google: "Created a timer for 15 minutes, how long do you want it to last?" There is also hilarious things going on with Google assistant on iOS. Like Norwegian with English pronunciation. These voice assistants are terrible. Sure, they are better that before, but still really bad. And it's even worse in other languages than English where stuff like the above happens.
• vmception 6y ago
  Two scientists walk into a bar. The bartender asks what they would like to drink. The first scientist says "I'll have a glass of H2O please." The second scientist says "I'll have H2O too." The bartender gives them both water because she is able to distinguish the boundary tones that dictate the grammatical function of homonyms in coda position, as well as pragmatic context. Siri, be like that bartender.
• zimlu 6y ago
  “Hey Siri, turn on all my alarms”
• too_long 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/3Qi3tT2Xulk https://youtu.be/3Qi3tT2Xulk This is famous cut from the famous Polish comedy from 1981. The man is trying to send a telegram to London. (Londyn in Polish.) The lady says: "There is no such a city like London. There is Lądek. Lądek-Zdrój (popular spa in Poland)."
• dzhiurgis 6y ago
  Siri on macOS freezes when I say “call dad” while works great on iOS.
• stevewilhelm 6y ago
  For fun, me: Hey Google, spell Elon Musk's son's name
• caogecym 6y ago
  > Bing got it right, with bonus of analog clock. I tried Bing and wow, the search UX is pretty awesome, it's like pixel copy of Google nowadays, they got the sign in button on right top corner, a image search icon on the right of search bar, and images of London on right side of page etc. But I just haven't been using Bing for years. Am I going to use Bing? Probably not, unless Google becomes unstable, which I don't foresee. For a commodity (free) Internet service like search engine, foster user habit is the key for adoption - if you got a piece of mind in users, they will stick around. Typing a different url is just counter productive since it has to deter mussel memory.
• psaux 6y ago
  Might as well comment, first employee at Siri here. This result “maybe” should provide ambiguity resolution, but where does it stop. The she/he who compared it to Google was right on. Siri provides singular results in most cases vs multiple search style results. We did use geo for locality based results in the past. This would solve the problem the OP mentioned, not sure if they call location for these requests now. The other person who mentioned we can’t/couldn’t train on data is correct too. Again, privacy first. Be proud, Apple cares a lot. When the Siri commercials hit (No one told us there would be commercials) when we launched, we got decimated, and couldn’t debug the issues, user utterances were not allowed to be logged. Luckily, after much sleep deprivation, one of my engineers (love you Stu) said, “hey, aren’t they running commercials” to all our surprise. We convinced the privacy team to let us log word parts. Then we started to see words that were present in the commercials. Fun fact, also happened when Tom Cruise was presenting at the Academy Awards. We had millions+ asks all at the same time, again word parts. “height”, “tom”, “foot”, etc.
• lattalayta 6y ago
  Does anyone know of any company that is working on a conversational OS like as was seen in the movie Her (2013)?
• altitudinous 6y ago
  "Hey Siri, how many days are left in the year?"
• strongjunior 6y ago
  What can we teach Siri? I've made Siri to remember who are my family members.
• mproud 6y ago
  Of course news travels fast. Someone on the Siri team fixed it.
• MR4D 6y ago
  My iPhone give me the right answer - London, England. Not sure why he got a different answer. And I’m in Texas about 120 miles away from London, Texas.
• mvkel 6y ago
  If Apple is going to be a services company, they need to make their services actually good. Could you imagine if their hardware was as bad as Siri? We’d never accept it. I wonder if the core Siri tech is just long in the tooth, but Apple is so pot committed to it, they can’t change it without a full rewrite.