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Cortana available on iOS and Android

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#91

Post by geuis »

Giving this a shot because I've always liked Windows Phone as a different experience from iOS and Android. I'm on a 5s with iOS 9.

Maybe the cortana servers are over loaded, but none of my questions are even being registered. All that happens is the app just keeps showing recommended news articles.

Finally got it to recognize a weather question. But I have headphones plugged in and somehow the app plays through the iPhone speakers instead of my headphones. I didn't even think that was possible.

Even speaking loudly and succinctly, the voice recognition only catches parts of a sentence or starts searching after only getting a single word like "what" or "who".

Gonna pass on this for now.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#92

Post by metheus »

guelo wrote: post #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!

How else would a voice activated personal assistant work?

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#93

Post by jonknee »

guelo wrote: post #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!

How else do you expect your virtual assistant to assist?

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#94

Post by ehaughee »

mderazon wrote: post #87

Why are both Cortana and Siri considered females ?

The name Siri came from the original company's name which, in turn, came from the founder's desire to name his daughter after a female Norwegian coworker of the same name [1]. Cortana is a female AI character from the Halo series. Of course in neither case does that mean they had to keep the gender the same for those reasons but it would appear the simplest explanation.

[1] http://theweek.com/articles/476851/how-apples-siri-got-name

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#95

Post by joosters »

AgentME wrote: post #57
Domenic_S wrote: post #36

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.

There are definitely more web browsers in China that have the Accept-Language header wrongly set to English, than there are English readers there who want English. So the websites may not know better than you, but they know better than the majority of the web browsers. It's not perfect, but they are making the correct general decision IMO.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#96

Post by BinaryIdiot »

danpeddle wrote: post #25
probably_wrong wrote: post #10

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…

Sigh, that's sad. 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. Google play is a prime culprit, for example, showing a mixture of language content on the play store. See also subtitles, dubbed content, books.. Another one - Sony's Playstation store, where if you choose a country, then the lang…

> 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.

Well, because they should and rightfully so. You shouldn't have to select a language every time you start an app. Instead it should use whatever language was set on your system. Anything else just isn't intuitive and would add more friction before a user could get anything meaningful done.

The parent comment was referring to Cortana only working with English and thus assumes the user can't speak English as he has his system set to Spanish. That's an unfortunate edge case but one that could be overcome with advanced settings should they want to deal with it. But again, the anecdote is an edge case and shouldn't be used to go against best practices in regards to localization.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#97

Post by izacus »

sremani wrote: post #13
Zekio wrote: post #7

still not available in a ton of countries in EU like denmark

The problem with EU is high customization per capita, given the diversity.

That doesn't mean that english functions have to be disabled. Google Now and Siri work just fine across EU. Cortana is deliberately disabled.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#98

Post by jamesoneill »

jrockway wrote: post #84
AgentME wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a while I had my system language preferences set as en-UK, ja, en-US and every so often I'd get an installation that was in Japanese because there was no UK English version.

Re: Cortana available on iOS and Android

#99

Post by TillE »

joosters wrote: post #95
AgentME wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are definitely more web browsers in China that have the Accept-Language header wrongly set to English, than there are English readers there who want English. So the websites may not know better than you, but they know better than the majority of the web browsers. It's not perfect, but they are making the correct general decision IMO.

> web browsers in China that have the Accept-Language header wrongly set to English

How? Seriously, how? Assuming the browser's interface is in Chinese, the Accept-Language header should be set properly.

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