Daring Fireball: 'What Time Is It In London?'

‘What Time Is It in London?’

Friday, 22 May 2020

Nilay Patel asked this of Siri on his Apple Watch. After too long of a wait, he got the correct answer — for London Canada. I tried on my iPhone and got the same result. Stupid and slow is a heck of a combination.

You can argue that giving the time in London Ontario isn’t wrong per se, but that’s nonsense. The right answer is the common sense answer. 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 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 lacking in common sense would get through a job interview. You don’t have to be particularly smart or knowledgeable to assume that “London” means “London England”, you just have to not be stupid.

Worse, I tried on my HomePod and Siri gave me the correct answer: the time in London England. I say this is worse because it exemplifies how inconsistent Siri is. Why in the world would you get a completely different answer to a very simple question based solely on which device answers your question? At least when most computer systems are wrong they’re consistently wrong.

I tried the same question on every other system I know where it should work: “What time is it in London?”

• DuckDuckGo: got it right.
• Google (including Google Assistant on a Pixel 4): got it right.
• Alexa: got it right.
• Bing: got it right, with bonus points for the best results presentation, which includes a live analog clock.

So every other service that tries to answer “What time is it in London?” gets it right. Only Siri gets it wrong.

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