Author: Rauf Aliev

June 19 2018, 11:21

Interestingly, so far not a single voice assistant or just a voice recognizer can properly process speech containing words from different languages. They also all have trouble recognizing words that are not in the English dictionary but are present in some limited list (like a phone directory). I still haven’t been able to teach Siri or Google to recognize Russian names spelled in Latin script through transliteration. It seems like a basic function of the phone, yet no, it doesn’t work.

June 16 2018, 14:55

More and more shops around us have completely switched to paper bags. Mostly, of course, not the cheapest ones. But in the few where there is still “plastic” at the checkout, that is, polyethylene (HDPE) bags, they very often ask “plastic bag?”. If you say “no”, they give you a paper one. Many customers come with their own bags. Almost all of them are motivated by environmental concerns rather than anything else. Polyethylene bags in our supermarket, for instance, are recycled separately. In some places, like Aldo, LDPE bags are only available for a fee, and in Costco (which is similar to Metro in Russia), there are no bags at all at the checkout.