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Comment by esolyt | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this isn't the best possible design. As others here have already pointed out, a better design would be presenting the options as:

4 hours from now

28 hours from now

This one doesn't require me to know the current date and also works as a sanity check to make sure I'm not confusing AM and PM.

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I think the majority of people would react poorly to that.

"Why are you asking me about number of hours, Siri?! I just said tomorrow, damnit!".

But you don't need to know the current date to know which one comes first. Well, unless the dates were in the past.

Great point. I think Fried's example is a little confusing to us because we don't remember right now what days Oct 21 and 22 were. But in the context of the interaction it should be fairly clear that, "Oh, it's just after midnight, Siri's confused because I actually meant today not tomorrow." The actual dates (21 vs 22) wouldn't matter, the two days Siri is trying to choose between is obvious in the moment.

I think the best would have been learning your tomorrow/today pattern and monitoring your use of the phone. For example, a "common" person will continue to use to tomorrow post-midnight until they have slept. The phone should monitor for lack of movement and use over 4-6 hours to identify a sleep schedule that is the person's day divider (patent pending!).

I think it's highly probable that if Apple put in enough thought to implement this feature at all, they thought of and tried out all the possibilities. Number of hours seems unnatural to me.

>they thought of and tried out all the possibilities

This doesn't guarantee to come up with the best implementation.

Do you always naturally know the date? Personally, I don't.

I will, however, always know how long 4 hours are, even if I travel to another planet someday. It also has the additional benefit of working as an AP/PM check.

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