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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

I feel the pain with setting an alarm... I have my phone set to 24 hour time. When I say 16:04, it's distinctly different than 04:04. Yet, I tell Siri to set an alarm for 09:40, it sets one for 21:40 like an idiot.

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In some countries that use 24 hour time notation it's really uncommon to use that in spoken language[0]. When I say four past four in Dutch, it could be 04:04 or 16:04. So even if you've set the clock to 24 hours, that doesn't mean you would actually say sixteen when referring to 16:xx.

You can set the region in the settings, maybe that influences the way Siri interprets time? (I would be surprised if it does, but you never know)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b...

Would you never use the 24h format when speaking? E.g I’m Swiss and I would often say 16:04 when referring to a precise time like a train departure. But four, quarter past four, half five and quarter to five.

No, I would use: four (vier uur, so literally translated four hour), four past four, quarter past four, half five, quarter to five.

It's pretty rare in North American English at least. You almost never hear it and it automatically brings up a military vibe to me.

I don't have a ton of experience using Siri, but it seems like it might have issues with time in general. I got an email just yesterday with an invite to a Zoom meeting attached, and I was about to just import the ics file into my Apple Calendar but then I noticed the email had a line saying Siri had detected an event and could do it automatically, which it did, but the listing was 5 hours early and scared my wife when she saw it because she thought I had scheduled something for the middle of the day when she was at work.

I have a lot of trouble understanding how plain text in the email saying 6:00 PM Central Time could have been interpreted as anything other than 6 PM Central Time.

It was also annoying that you apparently can't edit a calendar entry. I had to go to DuckDuckGo to search for how to change the time and you need to click and drag the box containing the event. There is no UI to just type in a time. I guess they did this to be able to deploy an identical app on Mac OS and iOS? Neutering desktop applications so they work better on mobile is an increasingly annoying trend.

I face the same annoying issues with Siri when I’m trying to set reminders from the Apple Watch. I often have to repeat 2-3 times then remove the incorrect ones.

But you have worst IMHO in other languages! When speaking German units are spoken before the tenths (fünf-und-dreizig to say 35). That completely confuses Siri when saying dates, hours/minutes, or just big numbers.

Dreissig*

I speak German to Siri everyday and she never has this issue with setting alarms. Maybe it’s a dialectical difference?

I’m not native and would be lying if I would say my German is great. But I don’t think it’s just about my prononciation, I see it often with German auto-generated subtitles or transcriptions, that dates or big numbers are transcribed incorrectly due to the unit-before-tenths grammatical construct.

A minute off from the 09:41 of Apple ads and screenshots:

https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-the-time-is-always...

Workaround: say hours at the end. I just said "hey Siri, set a reminder for oh nine fourty hours" and it handled the time perfectly by setting it to 9:40 AM.

You’re holding it wrong — How to blame your users

https://uxdesign.cc/youre-holding-it-wrong-how-to-blame-the-...

Suggesting a workaround for a failure of the software is not at all like suggesting they're doing something wrong.

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