
Siri, What Time Is It in London? - jmsflknr
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/05/22/what-time-is-it-in-london
======
jvolkman
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
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.

~~~
Deimorz
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.

~~~
OriginalPenguin
Ironically your best bet to get it fixed is almost certainly to post your real
address here as part of this thread.

~~~
p1mrx
Or post another address with the same problem, assuming it affects the entire
street.

~~~
Deimorz
It doesn't. Even the address for _the other half of the duplex_ (my address +
2) works fine. Sometimes we just provide that address instead and catch the
delivery people when they arrive, because it's easier than worrying about the
Maps issue.

------
kilo_bravo_3
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.

~~~
reaperducer
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.

~~~
GloriousKoji
Me: "120 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius"

Siri: "Contacting emergency services in five seconds"

To be fair I was in a noisy environment and Siri only got the "120" part but
seriously, why would that be okay? My phone is registered in America with an
American phone number and English set as it's only language. Why should it
think 120 is equivalent to 911?

~~~
reaperducer
I was having problems with a phone service where I needed to "press 1 to
continue," but it wasn't registering. Eventually I ended up pressing 112, and
my iPhone displayed "Calling emergency services," even though it's an American
phone in America.

I know some countries use 112, but that's too many edge cases colliding.

~~~
fphhotchips
In fairness here, 112 is an international standard (I think it's in the GSM
spec?) and is expected to work in the US.

~~~
reaperducer
I guess that makes sense. But it doesn't explain why the iPhone intercepted
those digits when I was punching into a phone menu system.

------
mojuba
This example illustrates how difficult AGI is and how far we are from it. We,
humans, tend to take advantage of the context to make communication simpler
and shorter. Just think about all the implications of this one simple
question: what time is it in London? Or e.g. how can I get from London to
Dublin?

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

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

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

~~~
Slartie
> 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.

~~~
quicklime
Flipping this around a bit: if someone in England asked "what's the time in
London?" should Siri assume that they're talking about London in Ohio or
Ontario? Everyone in England is on GMT, so they don't need to do timezone
conversions to London time.

~~~
makomk
There's an extremely long-standing convention of referring to timezones by the
major or capital city within that timezone, so Siri should of course assume
that they're talking about London in England. In fact, this is probably more
or less the correct, canonical way to ask this - asking about GMT would not
give you the correct answer, since England is currently on BST which is GMT+1.
Needless to say, this argument would not apply to asking about anything else
about London. Context is complicated.

For similar reasons, anyone who asks for the time in Boston probably means
Eastern Time regardless of how far they are from Lincolnshire, though I think
the more usual and canonical way of referring to that is New York time.

------
hn_throwaway_99
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
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
> 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
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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> 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.

How can you stand to deal with humans?

~~~
schrodinger
Humans are so many orders of magnitude better at comprehension that your
comment feels a bit disingenuous.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I was replying to the parent comment that said that basically any errors were
unacceptable, and that ever having to repeat himself was a deal breaker. This
seems like a ridiculous position to me given that, as you point out, humans
_are_ much better at comprehension, and even they can't hit this standard.

------
lqet
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).

~~~
ninkendo
> 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
Alexa responds to "wrong", and many variations of that, with cancelling the
previous action and thanking you for the feedback.

------
fridek
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
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
It also got much worse at keyword searches. It seems like the one capability
came at the cost of the other.

------
killion
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.

~~~
rockinghigh
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
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.

------
bgentry
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
> 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
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
Maybe some overly aggressive A/B testing?

------
ubermonkey
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
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
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.

------
jka
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
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).

~~~
brownbat
A group of us once tried to rank cities in Europe by population only to
realize that most of them are effectively incomparable.

Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the
question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that
sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this
block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so the number of
people you include ends up being pretty arbitrary.

~~~
taejo
While it is arbitrary, and not a city (in the sense that it hasn't received
that status from the Queen), Greater London is absolutely a defined
administrative area in the UK, with a governing body (the London Assembly) and
a mayor (the Mayor of London -- not the Lord Mayor of London, who is the mayor
of the City of London).

------
psaux
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.

------
ngngngng
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
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
Maybe you're traveling and want to know what the weather is at home.

------
wpowiertowski
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"

------
underbluewaters
"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.

------
DangerousPie
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".

~~~
chappar
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

~~~
eknkc
Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they
bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17).

My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this
point.

~~~
osrec
So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times,
but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for
development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.

~~~
eknkc
No, I don't think so. There are multiple aspects.

I develop on this thing. It is running a great Unix os. I can't stand desktop
Linux. The hardware quality was the best with a wide margin before the latest
gen. Battery life is also great. I like them for development work when they
are stable.

A lot of people are also really invested into the ecosystem. My entire photo
collection is on iCloud. I use an iPhone. I can copy paste between my computer
and phone. My Apple watch unlocks the computer when I'm near... List goes on.

But now I feel like Apple is a fantastic phone company that also happens to
make some computers. They have been degrading pretty bad.

~~~
noirbot
It's also that Windows/Linux has many of these issues as well. It's not as if
Windows 10 notifications are clear and intuitive. When I go to my desktop
after a day of work, Windows will slowly replay every single slack message and
email I got all day, one at a time, for almost an hour, as single
notifications.

I think it's less that OS X is bad now, but more that it's finally degraded to
a level of annoyance that people just have gotten enured to with Windows. It's
not to say that that's a good thing, but at this point, I have known bugs and
annoyances with all of the computers I work with, no matter the platform.

Some of it is also that Apple has a "real" integrated ecosystem. To what you
say, you can easily move things between iOS and OS X. If you're watching stuff
on your Mac, you can throw it to an Apple TV or your Airpods. Windows doesn't
have a version of that that "just works". The closest you get is opting into
Google's ecosystem and going Chromecast/Android, but I'd rather not trust
Google with even more of my info.

------
brownbat
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.

------
dreamcompiler
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.

~~~
casefields
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
Yeah, point very much taken. Agreed.

------
trombonechamp
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.

~~~
ahyattdev
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
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:AZ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona#/media/File:AZTZ.png)

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
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!

------
dustinmoris
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_

~~~
qayxc
In the absence of context, the best answer is London, UK.

You actually need to imagine additional context to make any other answer
plausible.

If you hear the sound of hooves clip-clopping nearby, you think horses, not
zebras.

~~~
irishsultan
In the absence of context there is no best answer. You need context to know
why London, UK is much more likely to be the right London "without additional
context".

~~~
qayxc
> In the absence of context there is no best answer.

 _sigh_ why do people always feel the need to redefine words?

By any definition of the word, "best" is correct term to use here.

Here's a few definitions of the word "best", please and in all honesty, tell
me why the use is wrong given the following:

• best: "In the most excellent or most suitable manner; with most advantage or
success: as, he who runs best gets the prize; the best-behaved boy in the
school; the best-cultivated fields."

• best: "In or to the highest degree; to the fullest extent; most fully: as,
those who know him best speak highly of him; those best informed say so; the
best-abused man in town."

• best: "Of the highest quality, excellence, or standing: said of both persons
and things in regard to mental, moral, or physical qualities, whether inherent
or acquired: as, the best writers and speakers; the best families; the best
judgment; the best years of one's life; a house built of the best materials."

So if there is a finite set of possible answers and a set of criteria that
establish a metric to turn this set into an ordered set, there is _by
definition_ a non-empty set of best answers. The context-free metric for
ranking cities is _global relevance_ :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city)

And now please look at the number 1 spot of this list.

Thanks for reading.

~~~
irishsultan
Yes, but that set of criteria to establish a metric is context.

~~~
qayxc
No, it isn't - see

> The _context-free_ metric for ranking cities is global relevance:
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city)

There is no context whatsoever in global relevance.

If you ask someone what time it is, you don't get asked "where?" in return -
the current location is implied. Same with cities - if you mention London, it
is implied that you mean the most globally relevant London, not the one that
was named after it.

~~~
irishsultan
> The context-free metric for ranking cities is global relevance:
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city)

I do not find the word context-free in that page. That's even ignoring that
there are different rankings on that page, each with different outcomes, once
again showing that without context there is no "best".

> If you ask someone what time it is, you don't get asked "where?" in return -
> the current location is implied.

Just because it's implied doesn't mean it's not context.

~~~
qayxc
> Just because it's implied doesn't mean it's not context.

So you're that guy who people should never ask for directions then, because
instead of explaining how to get to a place from where you stand, you'd ask
for the exact date and time of travel, and the starting location (including
continent, country, city, and street address)?

> I do not find the word context-free in that page.

Of course you don't, why would you even? "Context-free" is specific to the
issue at hand, e.g. given no additional information (e.g. where are you right
know and in what context do you ask the question) and a list of possible
answers, what would be the most likely?

Have you ever watched "Family Feud"? It's an entire show based around that
concept. It sounds like you are one of those guys who, when given "We asked
100 people what you would find in a kitchen" would expect the top answer to be
"DEA agents", because "kitchen" could refer to a drug lab...

> That's even ignoring that there are different rankings on that page, each
> with different outcomes, once again showing that without context there is no
> "best".

Are you shitting me? The point is, that in none of those lists - regardless of
_relative ordering_ \- other cities besides London, UK, and the rest of the
well-known global cities are listed.

It doesn't matter whether London, UK takes the #1 spot based on some set of
metrics, or the 3rd based on another - the point is that it's ALWAYS London,
UK and NEVER London, Ontario.

------
Hamuko
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".

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

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Polish people (in fact, people all over the world) can order on Amazon.de,
they just can't get the same shipping rates that German customers get.

~~~
pawelk
Ah yes, this is funny, because shipment from a warehouse in Poland to a
customer in Germany, placing an order on amazon.de is considered "local",
while shipment from this same warehouse to a customer in Poland is
"international".

Before COVID there were rumors that Amazon may officially enter Polish market
this year with state-owned Polish Post as the local shipping partner.

------
wilg
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
Amazing examples. Thanks for the videos.

------
azangru
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.

------
andy_ppp
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
> 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
They only use them for that because it sucks at everything else.

~~~
madeofpalk
I'm talking about all 'digital assistants' \- Google's and Amazons. All people
use them for is timers and weather.

------
hi41
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
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.

------
smellsdonkey
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
Things like this would be killer. These are things a real human assistant
could easily do and are deceivingly difficult for a computer.

------
starpilot
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.

------
knolan
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.

------
mdemare
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.

------
rland
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.

~~~
torgian
Agreed

~~~
tasssko
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'.

------
NightlyDev
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.

------
jen20
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
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
> 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
>> 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
Yeah, the crown dependencies are distinct sovereign states.

------
kempbellt
>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...

~~~
saagarjha
> If you saw someone write something like "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."
> you'd be quick to call them out as an "obvious" bad employer.

No, really, this is just a tired nitpick. I hear a lot of complaints about
Hacker News on other websites, about how the commenters are too nitpicky and
"Actually, …", but I usually don't mind or actually appreciate many of those.
This particular one really annoys me. Everyone knows that people make mistakes
all the time, and clearly you shouldn't fire them for simple ones. _But that
's not the point that was being made!_ You just sitting here claiming people
are obviously horrible because you saw the word "fire" is just not productive
at all.

~~~
kempbellt
I think the point translates just fine.

What I read was, "Siri doesn't give me exactly what I want by perfectly
understanding my own personal bias that London means, London, England, so I am
going to post a blog complaining about it, while simultaneously cracking a
joke that I would terminate someone's employment if they made a basic
mistake." Which I took to be pretty unproductive conversation.

Still, point made. OP would be terrible to work for and Siri could potentially
use some improvements in accuracy.

~~~
saagarjha
> Siri doesn't give me exactly what I want by perfectly understanding my own
> personal bias that London means, London, England, so I am going to post a
> blog complaining about it, while simultaneously cracking a joke that I would
> terminate someone's employment if they made a basic mistake.

At some point, an assumption that an extremely large majority of people would
reasonably make (I am hesitant to claim the number of "nines", but would guess
it to be at least three) stops becoming a "personal bias" and a and more of
"unless you were raised by wolves or some sort of homeschool for math savants
you really ought to know what I mean". If I'm talking about Springfield and
you take it to mean I am discussing the Simpsons and not one of the dozen
Springfields that exist in the United States, sure, that is an honest, "basic
mistake" (although I would prefer if you clarified the moment you guessed that
something might be wrong with your interpretation). Thinking that I really
meant the tiny town of London, Ohio that I have never mentioned and more than
likely probably don't even know exists when I say "London" instead of the
massive metropolis that is the capital of a major world country is just being
stupid: something is very off with your sense of context. (To finish the
argument: if I said "London" and you assumed "London, England" but I actually
did mean "London, Ohio", I would be extremely forgiving, to the point where I
would lay the fault on myself for not clarifying when I gave such a misleading
view.)

> OP would be terrible to work

Because they say they're not interested in employing people who cannot
understand more context than a reasonable human being needs to quite literally
live and interact with others?

> Siri could potentially use some improvements in accuracy

Siri could _absolutely_ use some improvements in accuracy.

------
russellbeattie
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_Si...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/China_Sign.jpg)

------
chris_f
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.

~~~
smacktoward
_> 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
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.

------
Sirikon
Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it.

The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.

~~~
SirHound
Is it? Siri is a digital assistant. The point is it should be held to a much
higher standard. It's currently awful to the point of uselessness. So what
standard of assistant is it? Not one you'd employ.

~~~
teruakohatu
I think treating Siri like a digital version of a Personal Assistant is going
a bit far. It is a simple Voice Interface to a bunch of apps, local databases
and cloud databases.

Nobody has ever said "Should I buy an Apple Watch for $750 or hire a PA for
$35,000/year?".

~~~
huffmsa
I would expect a 10 year old core feature on my $1750 phone / watch
combination to perform better than my 3 year old.

~~~
a1a1a1a1a1a1
I'm not a parent, so just speculating wildly, but there's a good chance your 3
year old has already cost more that $1750. Also, having met a few in my
extended family I would doubt that a 3 year old not from London would actually
know the time there, even if they could properly disambiguate the question.
The phone seems like good value by that comparison

------
denster
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
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).

~~~
quickthrower2
“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
If you're writing firmware for an embedded device without a clock then you'll
never have to deal with this. If your software only ever has to interact with
other software then you wouldn't ever use time zones unless you really have
to. Only humans demand time zones.

------
wadkar
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.

------
l0b0
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
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
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.

~~~
sbarre
> I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people living close to London Ontario
> who refer to it as simply "London"

Have you seen this comic by chance? Feels relevant here...

[https://condenaststore.com/featured/let-me-interrupt-your-
ex...](https://condenaststore.com/featured/let-me-interrupt-your-expertise-
with-my-confidence-jason-adam-katzenstein.html)

But go ahead and keep arguing.

------
arihant
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
Having been to London, Ontario, I can confirm that it also doesn't have quite
the same heft as London, England :)

------
dehrmann
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
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?

------
human
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.

------
bsanr2
>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.

------
thebouv
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
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"

------
totaldude87
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.

------
martin-adams
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?...](https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1263578310266679296?s=20)

------
squeaky-clean
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... :(

------
mattlondon
I get this problem _all the time_ and I live in "the right" London so it is
not just a "nearest London" thing.

It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps,
e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the
North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the
one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million.

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

~~~
aib
Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of
applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse,
"04/05/2020"?

~~~
larrik
I actually didn't realize am/pm wasn't something Europeans did...

~~~
ranieuwe
We love what US calls “military time”

~~~
sgjohnson
24h clock isn't exactly military time.

14:30 in military time would be fourteen hundred thirty hours, or one-four-
three-zero hours, or in written format 1430Z, Z being Zulu (UTC), or an actual
offset.

~~~
jki275
"military time" is a 24 hour clock.

14:30 is almost without exception read as "fourteen thirty" in military time.

I've never seen it either of the ways you describe above.

------
markstos
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.

------
SiliconMage
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/)

------
Jdam
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.

------
Apocryphon
Shouldn’t they simply default it to the most populous city by that name, or
some other criterion for “better-known”?

------
trashtester
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
> 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

------
austinl
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
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?

------
acwan93
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.

------
wtmt
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.

------
flatline
> 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.

------
caogecym
> 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.

------
zeveb
> 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.

------
dusted
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).

~~~
onion2k
_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.

~~~
dusted
Selecting a default behaviour based on what "most people" will benefit from is
great some cases, but mostly cases people will encounter only once.

People who happen to fall beside the "most" category should not have to deal
with that every single time.

The right thing to do for Siri is to ask, maybe just once, which london you
want to know the time for, if its not smart enough to infer it from something
else it's learned about you.

Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it's
entirely likely that they travel there more often, and if the siri software
has no other parameters tracked, then it's not unreasonable to assume that
they're asking about that.

~~~
onion2k
_Assuming a person is physically closer to the non-british london, it 's
entirely likely that they travel there more often..._

It's also reasonable to assume they're in the same timezone as 'their' London
and wouldn't need to ask what time it is in the local one. That's another
reason to default to one further away, which for most people would be Britain.

------
nathancahill
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)

------
brailsafe
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.

------
yakshaving_jgt
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
To be fair, most people think the tower bridge is the London Bridge, not just
a London bridge.

~~~
yakshaving_jgt
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).

------
raverbashing
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")

------
sheeshkebab
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.

------
mattmanser
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
DuckDuckGo just delegates to other search engines.

------
kjakm
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".

------
chx
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.

------
marius_k
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)

------
mensetmanusman
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.

------
danielrhodes
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.

------
unangst
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.

------
vmception
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.

------
too_long
[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)."

------
Zenst
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.

------
p4bl0
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.

------
jussij
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
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.

------
gambiting
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.

------
cpach
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

------
lordgrenville
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.

------
mvkel
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.

------
shwoopdiwoop
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.

------
glaberficken
Disambiguation is hard?

------
coffinbirth
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.

------
noisy_boy
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.

------
parliament32
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)

------
lajosbacs
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.

------
DenisM
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.

------
konschubert
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?

------
schrodinger
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.

------
lesinski
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.

------
kinnth
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.

------
dougwit
> At least when most computer systems are wrong they’re consistently wrong.

I disagree.

------
Dobbs
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
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
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.

------
frou_dh
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.

------
floatingatoll
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).

------
nimbix
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
Even worse when the band name isn't written with latin characters to begin
with.

------
sidcool
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.

------
MR4D
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.

------
anon269736
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
Same for Manchester, made doubly difficult by City.

------
birdyrooster
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
I can also confirm iOS, MacOS, WatchOS, and my AppleTV picked London, England.

------
varbhat
Side question. Do you use Siri/GA/Alexa/Alternatives for something serious?
(which can cost you something if not done properly)

------
jchook
I recently asked Siri for directions. Between two matching locations, she
picked the one 30 miles away instead of the one 2 miles away.

------
purpleblues568
What time can I get shirt without stripes in London?

------
kara_jade
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
Because it assumes you want to plan V2 rocket attacks.

------
lattalayta
Does anyone know of any company that is working on a conversational OS like as
was seen in the movie Her (2013)?

------
wojo1206
This doesn't apply to Chicago for some reason. Siri got it right here. We must
live far from any local London city.

------
emiliosic
It's likely the closest 'London' near the user. Side effect of living in
former British colonies.

~~~
rconti
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.

------
justinsaccount
Where would you draw the line though?

"What is the weather in Manhattan" probably means NYC, unless you are near
Kansas...

~~~
jldugger
But wildcats already know they need to suffix that one with a state qualifier.

------
monksy
Time for you to get a watch.

\- I'll see myself out.

------
grecy
I live in Western Canada, and whenever I tell someone my sister lives in
London, they guess I mean Ontario.

I mean the UK.

------
dilly_li
Meanwhile, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla self-driving technology will be worth
more than $100,000.

------
strongjunior
What can we teach Siri? I've made Siri to remember who are my family members.

------
reiichiroh
There’s a joke that every place name followers by a pause and Ontario is made
worse.

------
dzhiurgis
Siri on macOS freezes when I say “call dad” while works great on iOS.

------
Thorbassen
Apple should just integrate Google Assistant, it's second to none.

------
markkat
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
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
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.

------
mproud
Of course news travels fast. Someone on the Siri team fixed it.

------
cristi201
Siri doesn’t know that my wife it’s also my spouse. Enough said.

~~~
ericlewis
you can set that up in the contacts app.

------
swagatkonchada
Gold content here for Siri's PM team if they are watching.

------
altitudinous
"Hey Siri, how many days are left in the year?"

------
birdyrooster
Literally not reproducible. A lot of bluster over nothing.

~~~
dointheatl
I just tried it and my watch gave me the time in London, KY. I live in
Atlanta.

------
stevewilhelm
For fun,

me: Hey Google, spell Elon Musk's son's name

------
stblack
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.

------
maxwellito
"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?

------
artsyca
We've reached peak Daring Fireball

~~~
whywhywhywhy
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.

------
zimlu
“Hey Siri, turn on all my alarms”

------
mehrdadn
On that note, anybody know how often poor souls have booked flights to the
wrong "Ontario, CA" because of this mess?

~~~
interestica
Would you trust Siri or any assistant to book a flight for you?

~~~
mehrdadn
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.

------
node-bayarea
Google AI is AMAZING! Siri is Dumb!

------
fouc
Siri, What Time Is It in London, UK?

------
ycombonator
They are busy making TV shows.

------
craigsmansion
"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
What are RMS and ESR?

~~~
laumars
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)

------
augstein
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-...](https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/alexa-vs-google-assistant-vs-siri-
heres-which-is-best-based-on-living-with-all-3.html)

2)
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2020/04/18/does-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2020/04/18/does-
the-2020-macbook-air-have-an-overheating-problem-debate-rages-on/)

3) [https://www.ultrabookreview.com/21772-laptops-small-thin-
bez...](https://www.ultrabookreview.com/21772-laptops-small-thin-bezel/)

4) [https://www.laptopmag.com/news/uh-oh-apples-16-inch-
macbook-...](https://www.laptopmag.com/news/uh-oh-apples-16-inch-macbook-pro-
is-having-serious-speaker-and-display-issues)

5) [https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/16-macbook-pro-gets-
excessi...](https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/16-macbook-pro-gets-excessively-
hot-when-using-external-display/16738)

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/a...](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/12/9/21002605/apple-
tv-remote-salt-swiss-tv-company-replacement-buttons-normal)

------
new2628
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.

~~~
ksec
> 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
> 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.

~~~
throwaway744678
There are a lot of cities in the world, though.

