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Comment by heleninboodler | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, but for years I've felt like "Hey Siri, set an alarm for 7am" was 1000x easier than using the clunky Clock UI and it's almost exclusively what I use Siri for. Tasks that are so perfectly well-defined are exactly what this "smart" tech is useful for. Except that recently, Siri screwed me. I said "hey Siri, set an alarm for 6:30am" and her response was "Ok, your 6:30am alarm is on," but what she actually meant was "Ok, I ensured that your standing alarm for every tuesday at 6:30am is on" which meant she wasn't enabling the alarm for 6:30am tomorrow, so I overslept. Very annoying and completely blew my trust in a very useful function.

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Alarms and reminders are my most frequent uses of Siri (and to entertain/frustrate the kids...). It's also pretty good for hands-free quick texts while driving and hands-free calling, though I don't do those often.

Your alarm example is frustrating. Of course, you could say "set alarm for tomorrow at 6:30 am" which would work, but then you're back in the realm not of natural language commands, but formal commands that exist in the uncanny valley, just similar enough to natural language to be irritating when they fail.

Yeah, I would think it would be obvious to most humans that "set an alarm for 6:30am" never means "6:30am four days from now." It seems like it should just be interpreted as the next occurring 6:30am unless otherwise specified, but hey, I'm not a computer.

Edit: also, your "tomorrow at 6:30am" example is also open to interpretation if you're saying it two minutes after midnight. I'd really like it to recognize these sort of ambiguities and prompt me for clarification. "It's after midnight. By 'tomorrow at 6:30am', do you mean you want your alarm to go off about 6 hours from now or the next day?"

Siri does resolve that ambiguity, it will ask you “do you mean 6.30am on day X, or 6.30 am on day Y?”, using weekday names for good measure. That’s actually one thing they got pretty well.

... and this is exactly the sort of thing where I feel much more comfortable looking at a GUI that clearly says the date, day, and time all in one place. It would take me 2 seconds to verify that it's exactly as I want it instead of parsing a voice assistant's response.

Ouch. I just did a quickie test asking Siri to set me a reminder for 'tomorrow at eighteen'. No dice. It set it for 8 am.

It doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English.

"...set an alarm for tomorrow @ eighteen hundred." works just fine. At least in U. S. English, I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to 6 p. m. as "eighteen".

But that's the problem most people don't speak U.S. English as their primary language.

They use all kinds of languages with all kinds of accents and and ticks.

In my experience, and from the time I did a bit of NLP the situations is often along the line of. It works for mostly accent free simple English. Fails to get anywhere usable on most other languages and or accents. Sure that is to some degree because of missing training data. But for a consumer this doesn't change that for very many consumers this features work terrible bad.

Just out interest I tried out the youtube auto generated subtitle for a german video, but even at the parts where the text was super clear and well pronounced the result was hardly differentiable from randomly picking arbitrary words. It wasn't even that the algorithm choose similar sounding word. They where completely different words in many case. I think in a sentence of ~10 words in average 1 or 2 where correct. And that was at the parts where the text was unusually clear understandable. At other parts it wasn't even able to recognize that there where words...

Except it isn't a hundred, it's sixty, and I protest that usage. >.<. I prefer eighteen o'clock.

It's standard US military terminology and part of US culture and language.

Just imagine all the idioms they have to account for in these voice algorithms. I know in German they also handle "halb neun" correctly as 8:30.

That works fine in Siri.

Although it does have a problem with hours over 20 (“22 o’clock” becomes 20:02 for some reason, possibly because of my thick Italian accent).

but you would still understand them if they did or take 5 seconds to ask a clarifying question.

I live in Redmond, WA. Frankly, if someone asked to meet for a meal at eighteen, I would assume they would like to get together in a Microsoft cafeteria closest to the (what I believe to be non-existent) Building 18. My backup option would be to assume that they have received a hard blow to the head at some point in their life.

Again, whether I would understand them or not, no one to my knowledge speaks like that in U. S. English. It is a great example to use to show the quirks of language. It is a bad example to use to show that Siri "doesn't even support 24 hour time - at least in English".

I'm not English. We don't say eighteen hundred for 18:00, we say just eighteen. And I don't have localized Siri.

And in any case i said eighteen not eight a m.

Officially building 18 does not exist. Anything you may have heard about building 18 is just rumour. If you have any questions regarding the purpose of building 18, you should direct them to Shelley in HR.

Hey, it's been well over a decade since I worked there. :-)

https://campusbuilding.com/b/microsoft-building-18/

"report to Shelley in HR for re indoctrination" would be better :)

..."at eighteen"? "Eighteen hundred hours" is how it's pronounced.

On the google side, "wake me up at 7" results in a 7AM alarm 95% of the time and a 7 PM alarm the other 5%. Just frequent enough to screw you over…

Agreed, I find this to be a great use case for voice assistants. Or on the occasion I feel like napping after lunch "Hey Siri, wake me up in an hour".

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