My AI assistant tried to book a flight to the wrong Springfield last month

I was at home trying to plan a trip to Springfield, Missouri for a conference. I asked my voice assistant to find flights, and it pulled up options for Springfield, Illinois without asking which one. I almost booked a non-refundable ticket before I caught the mistake. It took me 20 minutes to cancel and start over with the right city. I had to be super specific and double-check every detail after that. Has anyone else had an AI mix up locations with the same name?

2 comments

2 Comments

vera_brown409d ago

My smart thermostat once tried to set the temperature for Springfield, Massachusetts when I live in Springfield, Oregon. It pulled the wrong weather data for a whole day because of the name mix up. These systems really need to use your device's location as the main clue before guessing. I had to dig into the app settings to manually lock it to my local forecast.

sandrashah9d ago

Actually most smart thermostats do use your device's location first, but sometimes the GPS data is just wrong or fuzzy. You probably just got a bad location ping that day.