Apps - just not smart enough.
Discussion
Apps, we love em. We download em, we use em, we get new ones, and they all promise to make our lives better, easier, simpler, whatever. But really, they ain't as good as they could be.
Take Waze, for example. It's supposed to be a great sat nav that "knows" what's going on ahead and re-routes you to minimise your travelling time. Except it doesn't. Many times it's taken me down a route, only for me to drive onto the tail end of stationary traffic, and the second I use the notify others feature to advise of the traffic, up pops a warning on screen that there's "traffic ahead, expect a 15 min delay". (Or words to that effect). Bit pointless now I'm stuck in 3 miles of stationary traffic, when just 1 mile before I couldve got off and re-routed...
Another thing it does that could be a lot better... it learns my commute, so much so that in the morning it makes an educated guess about which site I'm going to, and all I have to do is click go and we're off. Now, there are only really a couple of routes that I can take, so why does it have to tell me, turn by turn, my route to work? If it's smart enough to guess where I'm going, surely it's smart enough to know that I know the way to work, as long as it says take main route down m6, or go round on m6 toll and then it can stfu unless it has to butt in if there's a delay ahead, except it can't (see point 1 above).
What apps have you used to totally failed to live up to expectations?
Take Waze, for example. It's supposed to be a great sat nav that "knows" what's going on ahead and re-routes you to minimise your travelling time. Except it doesn't. Many times it's taken me down a route, only for me to drive onto the tail end of stationary traffic, and the second I use the notify others feature to advise of the traffic, up pops a warning on screen that there's "traffic ahead, expect a 15 min delay". (Or words to that effect). Bit pointless now I'm stuck in 3 miles of stationary traffic, when just 1 mile before I couldve got off and re-routed...
Another thing it does that could be a lot better... it learns my commute, so much so that in the morning it makes an educated guess about which site I'm going to, and all I have to do is click go and we're off. Now, there are only really a couple of routes that I can take, so why does it have to tell me, turn by turn, my route to work? If it's smart enough to guess where I'm going, surely it's smart enough to know that I know the way to work, as long as it says take main route down m6, or go round on m6 toll and then it can stfu unless it has to butt in if there's a delay ahead, except it can't (see point 1 above).
What apps have you used to totally failed to live up to expectations?
moleamol said:
Opposite to what you asked but Google is pretty s
t hot for accurate maps/sat nav.
The traffic isn't. It seems to look at the traffic in real-time rather than adjusting for the traffic when you get to that point, when working out the quickest route.t hot for accurate maps/sat nav.Every single morning it tries to take me to work via Gateshead because it's a minute quicker than going via Whickham. It must know that in the 20 minutes it takes me to get there that Gateshead will be grid-locked, which means by the time I get to Newcastle, that's snarled too, which means when I get to where I'm going that's all snarled too. That route is 15 minutes slower than Google tells me every single morning.
It's even worse if I work in Manchester, sure there's no traffic at 6am, but I'm going to hit Leeds just before rush hour and Manchester at rush hour, so the ETA is pushing an hour out.
moleamol said:
Google changes in real time, it's not quite the AI you seem to imagine exists but it will re-route if another route is quicker.
It's not ai - if it knows enough to know where I'm going, it can't be that much more difficult for it to know which route I'm taking' that's just a database management thing. Waze runs off the back of google maps, but routing is very slow to respond to changes , or so it appears.Gassing Station | The Lounge | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff