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To be fair, where I'm from, "London" would probably refer to London, ON, but that's just because I live in Southern Ontario. So it's not like no one has heard of it.

On the other hand: no one in Southern Ontario will be asking what time it is in London, ON because it's all in the same time zone, so this seems like a problem.

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Well, and it's further complicated by the context of what's being asked. Coming from Waterloo Region, if I ask what time it is in London, I almost certainly mean in England. But if I ask for directions to get to London, I probably mean the one that's a few hours away by car.

So it's not as simple as just fitting these queries into generic templates and sending all instances of $LOCATION to a common geocoder.

Now if we could just wipe Waterloo IA off the map...

Yes, but we expect those assistants to be a little smarter than college programming assignment...

It really highlights how all language is incredibly ambiguous, and depends on all sorts of cultural and semantic contexts to disambiguate, despite the inherent ambiguity not being at all a problem for its users.

There's so much more to language than just a string of sounds or characters.

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