Right. What happens when you call 911 and they send the ambulance to "gravy.sun.request" instead of "gravy.sun.requests" or whatever?
The odds of such a similar name being located in the same city are low, so they'd probably notice the discrepancy, but there's still a lot of room for error in communicating the words, since they're not normalizing singular/plural or tenses.
I can think of two phases. First, the problem is with people who don't have an address. They currently have to say "send an ambulance to the blue building just above the X gas station near the police station in west Y". Having some sort of address - even with ambiguity! - is better than now. And we don't know if there is local ambiguity.
(Also, dialects make a difference. My dialect has "pen/pin" as a homonym. Rhoticity adds another layer of complications.)
Then again, we already have homonym problems. For example, "Greene St." vs "Green St." Newark, Jersey City, NYC, and Brooklyn each have one or the other, within a span of a few miles. For the ambulance problem, E911 system in the US has a rough idea of where you are calling from, and can help disambiguate.
Which means we know it's possible to build a system on top of similar names. But the first step is to get some names.
I was actually reasonably impressed with the system; they don't put nearby words near each other, so if you have a typo it becomes pretty obvious to anything but the most braindead delivery system.
So if what you're writing on the envelope is
Bob Smith
reporter.smoked.received
France
it becomes trivial to correct that to reporter.smoker.received, unlike when you write "124 Main Street" instead of "123 Main Street".
To what3words' credit, when I typed reporter.smoker.received into the map tool, it did suggest the correct location in its list of similar locations. https://imgur.com/G2ChrxA.png
Except the alternative is probably even worse, so it might be a net reduction in confusion - here in Costa Rica my address is a lengthy sentence of directions from a locally well known school nearby!
Amazon Global will deliver most things right to my door now and it's surprisingly inexpensive shipping + customs taxes (in some categories). Hard part is finding stuff that ships directly, they have a checkbox to filter for international shipping but it's not completely accurate. Shipping time is 2 - 3 weeks minimum.
For everything else and stuff Amazon doesn't ship I use Aerocasillas or a PO box at the post office. Aerocasillas are pricey but they do their job and fast, something arriving at their address in Miami on Monday is usually available to pickup by Friday. The post office recently didn't tell us about a package my sister sent until after they'd sent it back lol.
"Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and, starting next month [article is from Nov 2015], Arabic"
Yes, three-word phrases have more cues for memory. They mean more than a random string of numbers. It also looks similar to a method for improving memory, by finding weird mnemonics.
Weird is memorable, and more meaning acts like a checksum to reduce errors.
