I laughed and said the kitten was lucky he was so cute, as he’d never make it on smarts alone. Husband wrote back that the kitten was a mere apprentice, and in a year’s time would be a mighty hunter.
Google, helpfully reading over our shoulders, offered to create an event for this.
So, Dopers, whaddya got? Have your AI assistants ever tried so earnestly, yet so ineffectually, to help?
I once wanted to see a map of, I dunno, Vermont or something, and instead I got driving directions from my location in California all the way to Vermont, with a helpful warning that there was heavy traffic in St. Louis.
I wondered if there was heavy traffic in St. Louis right now and Google thought that was relevant, or if Google was predicting there would be heavy traffic in the 2 days or so it would take me to reach to St. Louis.
Speaking of Google Maps, I was once using it to navigate to somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was driving across the San Mateo Bridge, when the navigation voice said “continue straight.” Gee thanks, Google. I was going to make a right turn into the bay until you told me to keep going straight across the bridge.
I was looking for parts for a Ford-a-matic transmission and was offered a website that common decency and board decorum prevents me from disclosing even a description of.
In 2016, my mother, father, father’s boyfriend, and I took a cross-country trip from our home in Virginia to my sister’s place in Nevada. The reason for this is because Mom got a new car, a Prius, and my sister needed a car, so we took our old car, a PT Cruiser, to her. (We also visited with her for a few days, obviously.)
Mom and I rode in the Prius, while Dad and her boyfriend drove the Cruiser. Everything was going relatively uneventfully until we decided to stop for the evening in O’Fallon, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis.
I had Google Maps set up to direct us to the hotel.
Or so I thought.
In the middle of the city, it kept directing us to make U-turns, and my dad, confusedly, followed along. I realized after a few minutes that the map feature had defaulted to the approximate center of the city, which led nowhere, instead of the actual hotel. So I had to go back into the Choice Hotels app and re-enter the address.
“O’Fallon, Illinois” is still a running gag in our family.
The Yellowhead highway runs through Edmonton. Spoken directions using Maps is generally trouble-free.
Except when approaching one particular intersection and routed a particular direction, Maps will advise that, in x number of meters, I should turn left onto Yellowhahohahead Highway.
All other mentions of the highway are read correctly.
It’s been a while since I’ve navigated through that area, it might be corrected now.
Earlier today, my wife was looking at a picture of a red-eyed tree frog, like this guy:
She then said, “Alexa, where do I find red-eyed tree frogs?” (She wanted to know where they live.) And Alexa started talking about toys and books for sale on Amazon, about red-eyed tree frogs. My wife rolled her eyes at me. “That wasn’t helpful.”
After I told Alexa to stop, I asked, “Alexa, where do red-eyed tree frogs live?” And, then, I got the answer she was looking for (they range from southern Mexico to Colombia).
I’ve mention this before but the last time we went to Grand Canyon’s south rim I opted to come in the East Entrance rather than the much more commonly used Tusayan entrance on the south side of the park. On departing Cameron I put in the address for the Bright Angel Lodge where we were staying into the navigator and started tooling west on AZ-64.
Having been that way before I was not paying attention to the nav until the lady says, Turn left in one-half mile in the middle of nowhere. I slow down and stop on the shoulder. The nav wanted me to take a National Forest dirt road. Checking the future commands I see that it wants me to wind up on the highway to Tusayan about a mile south of the entrance to the park. Bringing up Google Maps on the phone I can see that it is a little shorter than sticking to the plan, but includes 40 or 50 miles of dirt road.
Heeding the age-old advice of driving in Arizona, Inquire locally before driving off a highway, I said, “Fuck that shit,” and continued on 64. She tried for thirty miles to get me to turn around and take that damn dirt road before giving up and routing through the East Entrance.
Similar to Wildabeast I travel west on US-60 to Wickenburg frequently and there’s one spot about 40 miles out from there where I am directed to Continue on US60. It’s not quite like being on the San Mateo bridge but there isn’t even a dirt road there to tempt me. I’m wondering if it’s a seam in the Matrix or something.
A couple of years ago, while on vacation in South Korea, I rented a car from one of the agencies on the American military base in Seoul. The car was equipped with an in-dash mounted navigation system. For the entire trip to a base in another city and back, the blame thing helpfully informed me as I passed the turning points to “Turn left/right in 100 meters”. That would’ve been fine and dandy had there been a place to turn 100 meters up the road to get me on the correct road. Even while driving in Seoul, the thing had everything off by 100 meters. I’m happy to say that the next time I rented a vehicle from that outfit, the navigation issued had been corrected.
I had Google Maps telling me several times to make a left turn on the Autobahn, in the middle of nowhere. There are NO left turns on the Autobahn, anywhere.
There’s a fun thing about Switzerland. Many of the so-called farmer roads are not marked with speed limits. So the GPS often tells us to go on the farmer roads because that will be faster.
They are farmer roads, which means they are single lane and are actually restricted. The can be used if you need to use that road to get to, well, a farm. But the roads are not meant for using as shortcuts between regular roads, and often have milk tankers using them.
If the GPS systems tells us to take a farmer road, we ignore it. Less frustration.
I recently rented an Opel in Spain (have already written what a mediocre car that was) and the navigator kept on saying that the autopista AP7 we were driving or about to take was the autopista apartado postal siete. AP probably means autopista de peaje: toll road or highway. Apartado postal means PO box.
That was as helpful as the recurring warning at irregular intervals that the dead angle warning system did not work right now.
My first dashboard GPS had a few oddities. Most memorably, it once told me to drive through a playground full of children. When I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, it would locate my car about a half mile in the middle of the bay. When I tried to navigate to my apartment, it would drop the pin to my place in the middle of the freeway offramp and refuse to elaborate further.
Speaking of GPS oddities, my U.S. based phone maps app had apparently never encountered any Irish (clockwise) traffic circles before as it nearly melted down screaming “Turn Right! Turn Right! Turn Right! Turn Right!” the entire time we were in one.
Not quite as bad as the built in Jaguar maps which seemed to think that, instead of driving to the local Denny’s in San Diego, we would prefer to drive to Dennys, Azerbijian which was merely six thousand miles and an ocean away.
Some years ago I was flying to Chicago to attend a convention. As part of my planning I went to the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) website to see if there was a way to get from O’Hare to the hotel on public transit. The last stage of the directions, after having me take a train from the airport and transfer to another train, was to drive from the last train station to the hotel. Note that this was pre-Uber so it wasn’t suggesting that I call for a ride, nor was I being told that I could call the hotel to be picked up by a shuttle.
I guess I was supposed to arrange for a car rental to be available at the train station. Of course, since I don’t drive, this would have posed a bit of a problem.
