Some of my feature requests are more ambitious than others, but my latest one is extremely unassuming. I would simply like Apple to appreciate that there are places other than California when it comes to Siri’s weather reports.
While I’m sure that the standard reports given by Apple’s voice assistant work just fine for Cupertino, they are lacking a vital ingredient for places like London …
I’m on record as being a big fan of voice interactions with my Apple devices. I dictate a lot of text, including most of my pieces here, and I have one or more HomePods in every room of my house, mostly so that I can issue voice commands wherever I happen to be.
I almost exclusively use HomePod voice commands to control my smart home, for example. I’m also in the habit of asking my HomePods for a weather report when I’m deciding what to wear before heading out. But there’s a problem with the default HomePod response to these.
Allow me to illustrate with the standard response I get from my HomePods:
Q: Hey Siri, what’s the weather forecast for today?
A: Expect cloudy skies today. The high temperature will be 12 degrees and low will be seven.
(If that seems a little chilly, I should note that the UK uses Celsius and not Fahrenheit for temperatures. It’s still a rather cold day for the time of year, but that range is 44-54F.)
While the temperature range is certainly one very important piece of information, there’s an equally crucial one which Siri omits, requiring me to ask a follow-up question.
Q: Hey Siri, is it going to rain today?
A: It’s likely to rain within the next hour.
Top comment by John Lockwood
Apple has had a nasty habit of thinking US = Earth.
For years the weather app labelled all locations in London as simply 'London'. This was intensely annoying as this happened even if you searched for and saved borough level locations in the app, e.g. Chelsea, Westminster, Islington, etc. as you could not later select the correct location in the list since they were all merely labelled as 'London'.
Note to Americans. London is literally twice the geographic size of New York so it is very common for weather to be very different in different parts of London. It should also be noted that at the time this was a failing of the Weather app, it did list boroughs of teeny tiny New York.
Thankfully this was eventually fixed by Apple. (Yes I had filed bug reports over this.)
I can now whilst at work in part of London, see the weather at home in a different part of London, or vice versa.
I ask that follow-up question literally every time, and a good percentage of the time it tells me that it is either raining or is going to rain. Each time it does so, I silently voice another follow-up question: “Why the **** didn’t you say so, then?!”
So, Apple, allow me to introduce you to places that aren’t California. We have this phenomenon where water falls out of the sky. In places like London and Seattle, this happens quite frequently and the water then lands on us. In order to prevent it doing so, we like to wear raincoats or carry umbrellas.
When asking for a weather report to decide what to wear, we would like to know whether we should include one of these items. Thank you for your kind attention.
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