Re:Why Bother with What Three Words?
by Anarch157a on Thursday March 28, 2019 @08:00PM
(#19517883)
> Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone.
Same thing is true for words, there are words in my native portuguese that are dificult to tell from each other even in person, imagine by phone. If some one misunderstands a word and it's valid on a combination?
For example (in portuguese), Paca.Tatu.Cotia (Paca.Armadilo.Agouti in english) can be misheard as Maca.Tatu.Quati (Stretcher.Armadilo.Coati in english). What if both combinations are valid, but thousands of km away ?
Re:Why Bother with What Three Words?
by roywiggins on Thursday March 28, 2019 @09:41PM
(#19518434)
The NATO alphabet was built to solve nearly exactly this problem. It's quite verbose (by design).
But because they are thousands of km away it is easy for a human to tell which is correct based on context. And the search screen works very well. It autocorrects, gives a distance and a country flag.
I understand the difficulty with speech, but that is true of any verbal communication.
> The problem with those kind of numbers is that they are easy to get wrong by a couple of digits. Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone.
This already presupposes that the parties involved in the communication are using smartphones, so why not send the coordinates over SMS, email or any other available messaging system?
And guessing distances seems like a pretty unusual thing to do. Especially as latitude/longitude is a terrible system for that anyway. Small distances are very small numbers and hard to think about.
It is possible to make a spelling mistake in what three words, but the mistake will be readily obvious if you know the general location.
I shared your scepticism until I tried the app. The auto-complete is really slick and it just works. For sending coordinates through a human/speech interface it is just going to be more reliable. For ever other problem use another solution.