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Cortana available on iOS and Android

blogs.windows.com

81–90 of 144 posts

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#81

Just tried it out on my Nexus 6. Scrolling the "home" list feels sluggish to me, as does the "Notebook" feature. Is this written in something like Cordova? I certainly hope not.

MS pushes hard on Xamarin. But yeah that scrolling is hell of chunky.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#82

I want to like Cortana, I really do. Unfortunately, it's linked to my phone's default language. So even though I could speak English, Cortana will not talk to me because my phone's interface is in Spanish. That is something I can understand - maybe there are development reasons why second language voice recognition is not possible. However, every time I update my OS, Cortana is added to my main screen again, perhaps…

Interestingly, Google Now lets you enable multiple languages, and it can tell which you're speaking at the moment. I was quite impressed when it could understand my Japanese.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#83

How about you let me strip it completely out of Windows 10 instead of just turning/disabling it mostly off?

You can disable all its callback features. All that's left is the interface to windows search. 9)% of what Cortana is is just a new cross-entity search framework for your stuff. But you can turn it all off by unpairing it (or just using an local Win10 Account).

Or you can keep squatting on Windows 7 until it EOLs and use a desktop OS that manages to be even more dated than Mac OS X.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#84
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It baffles me that there are still so many services that try to 'automagically' intuit which language someone wants to have a service in, instead of just simply .. asking. My experience is that language/locale implementation for a big project is so complex that PMs like to handwave the language selection part away. On a recent project I had to go back and ask, "What if an english-speaking user is traveling in Germa…

When I was in China for a while, a frustrating thing was that many websites I've visited often started assuming and practically insisting that I knew Chinese. There was more than one site that I couldn't figure out how to switch back to English. I checked that my browser was still giving the "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" header, but clearly websites know better than me.

Accept-Language is fun. I have an accept-language that orders them en, ja, other. aa.com (American Airlines) then uses that to display the content to me in English, except dates and times which always appear in Japanese (12月25日 午後1時10分). Fun times.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#86
post #9

do Siri, OK Google or Cortana offer any API's for 3rd party apps? So that I could do things like get X app to do Y with voice commands? Either when I've got the app open/focused, or even when the app isn't running?

Not what you are asking about, but I find it very useful; Microsoft has a product called power BI which is a dashboarding/BI solution and you can create dashboards for Cortana.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#88
post #58

I want to like Cortana, I really do. Unfortunately, it's linked to my phone's default language. So even though I could speak English, Cortana will not talk to me because my phone's interface is in Spanish. That is something I can understand - maybe there are development reasons why second language voice recognition is not possible. However, every time I update my OS, Cortana is added to my main screen again, perhaps…

I have similar experiences living in a country where the dominant language is not my own. I hate the assumption that location should determine language preference. I've worked with several really smart programmers from the US during my career. However, I've noticed that their geographical knowledge of anything outside the US is extremely poor (generalisation I know). I assume this is due to the education system. Coul…

> So I say to Facebook and Google, "use the language of the user, as defined in their browser language s settings primarily, but offer the user a choice to change it. I'd like 25% of the increased sales"

Unfortunately this is not always accurate. Chrome on my Mac for example uses "en-us" despite the fact that my machine is entirely configured to use British English (en-gb). For my own websites I'm forced to geoip the location to infer which subset of English to use - most annoying.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#89
I'm really excited about this, because it gives us another option that isn't constrained by specific platforms. I know there are complaints left and right, but we have to bear in mind it's only just been released, Microsoft is competent enough to fix the warts. Hopefully they're quickly responsive during these crucial moments of the apps release. I'm going to install Cortana and leave it on my phone even if I have to avoid using "her" for a little while. Though I hope that's not the case.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#90
Went to install it on Android until I saw the list of permissions:

  - Device & app history
  - Identity
  - Calendar
  - Contacts
  - Location
  - SMS
  - Phone
  - Photos/Media/Files
  - Microphone
  - WiFi connection information
  - Bluetooth connection information
  - Device ID & call information
Wow!
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