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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 w
by 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 agoAs 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 agoThe 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...)
- vidarh 6y agoAlexa responds to "wrong", and many variations of that, with cancelling the previous action and thanking you for the feedback.
- knodi123 6y ago> Siri is already a bit too chatty, and I never feel like having an extended conversation with her. Tell me about it. I have to unpair my bluetooth headphones every day, for stupid reasons that aren't Siri's fault. But when I say "Siri, open bluetooth preferences", it parses my command on screen VERY quickly, and then slowly enunciates "Okay! Let's take a look at your bluetooth settings." I'm just tapping my foot and waiting for her to quit talking. Of course, then, 1 out of 3 times it takes me to the wrong settings page. Because if Settings has been opened recently, it can't deep link from Siri. /shrug