When, for reasons well-known to some readers of this blog, I suddenly needed to find a new mobile carrier on February 1, I decided to return to the AT&T fold.
Because, from their point of view, it would be a new contract, I was entitled to new-customer pricing on devices, so I decided to rediscover my madness for Windows Mobile with a
Samsung BlackJack II, which I quite recommend unless one has a need for an esoteric feature it doesn't have.
For me, the coolest feature was the built-in GPS, which works out of the box with (for example) Google Maps Mobile. Since I was actually more interested in more technical GPS information than moving maps, I soon installed
GPS Skinner, and later
gpsVP. The GPS feature has now become just about my favorite toy ever.
How does this relate to AskMeNow?
Early in my GPS experience, I was motionless in downtown LA and one or the other of those applications reported my altitude at several hundred feet, which seemed high to me (in retrospect, I think because it hadn't fully triangulated).
I decided, instead of Googling, to Ask AskMeNow Now.
Me to AskMeNow, 3/11 5:54pm:
'What is the altitude of Los Angeles?'Me to AskMeNow, 3/11 6:47pm:
'What is the altitude of Los Angeles?'I guess their NLP didn't get the point. I almost repeated it, prefaced with 'Cmon, this is easy, ', but waited until:
Me to AskMeNow, 3/12 3:26pm:
'What is the altitude of Los Angeles?'And at last, AskMeNow to Me, 3/12 3:29pm:
Los Angeles, CAElevation: 5ft/1m73.1 ?F / 22.8 ?CClear...and that seems a bit low (but probably is just the minimum altitude for LA, which is horizontally huge), but the mild indictment is that it took three questions over two days to get the answer.
I suspect some sort of AI fields easy obvious questions, sending the others to humans (cf. Pronto and iNetNow), and this happened to all three questions, the first two getting lost in the 'human queue'. AskMeNow, GetTheAnswerLaterIfAtAll. I *love* automation, but some things just need a human touch.