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Comment by corobo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to try changing my behaviour for a voice assistant lmao. It works or it doesn't.

That's how I talk. Thats how I've talked for 32-$childhood years.

But you are changing your behavior. If you told a human “timer 1 hour 30” they’d look at you very strangely. My suggestion is to stop using special phrasings for voice assistants.

If I told a human to set me a timer they'd look at me strangely anyway. I want quick, done, command, action. It is a computer.

I'm not having a conversation with the thing, I want it do do something. Command, parameters.

I told bash

   computer, list the invisible files in my home folder

but in a shocking turn of events, when you use it wrong it doesn't work

Come off it. If I say "timer 1 hour 30 minutes" it works fine. It's the British way of giving duration that doesn't work.

In what world does "timer one hour 30" parse into "Set an alarm for 1:30am and call it timer"

Presumably if a French person had trouble you'd tell them to just speak English?

Oh sorry, I thought your complaint was about having to phrase things as sentences. Yeah, Siri is pretty stupid about inferring that the number after hours is minutes.

Parsing time related stuff in general seems to be an issue. "Set a timer for a minute fifteen" makes an alarm named "Timer" set for 3 PM.

But if you say "Set a timer for a minute fifteen seconds" it works fine.

Curious if anyone else can duplicate the "a minute fifteen == 3 o'clock" issue or if it's somehow hearing me wrong.

I used your exact wording and it did exactly what you said: created an alarm named "Timer" set for 3PM. I also did it with Siri's language set to "English (United Kingdom)" and "English (Ireland)" and it still did the same thing, so this idiosyncrasy appears to be independent of which language Siri is set to (at least within the set of varieties of English it supports).

Also replicated in English (Australia), so I agree. I would have phrased this as "one and a quarter minutes", which works, or "75 seconds" which also works just fine. for the 1 hour 30 request above, I would usually phrase this as "an hour and a half" which works just fine. I agree siri can be very picky though - things need to be phrased a certain way, and adapting speech patterns to that is frustrating.

Other simple time-based requests such as "what's the time difference to singapore?" don't work on siri either, which is irritating as I work across multiple time zones and I'm forever figuring out time differences.

This is hilarious considering the etymology of the term "computer". The first computers were people who performed computations. Computers as you're using it, is a Digital Computer.

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