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Farewell, Cortana

gizmodo.com

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Re: Farewell, Cortana

#61

Post by pndy »

I won't be crying since it never worked on my WP devices in first place and setting up device only to talk to the virtual voice assistant in English, in non-English language country was some weird acrobatics; once finally I managed to test it out, I had this feeling the voice had kind of mocking tone. The substitute or basic assistant for Poland was capable of understanding the language but you'd have to skip all grammar so it could understand you correctly - notably skipping noun grammatical cases. Perhaps the complexity of Slavic languages (and other non-English ones) is still a barrier for this technology.

The presence of voice assistants on desktop operating systems is a completely different issue - personally, I don't see how these can be useful; they're more of a gimmick feature aimed at less experienced users.

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#62

Post by albertzeyer »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #37

Does an offline voice assistant fit on a watch or a smart phone? Is it possible to open source one?

Yes. The big parts are the models (neural networks (NN)). You can make them quite small (sparsification, quantization, transfer learning to smaller models, ...). But this is non-trivial.

Kaldi is the most complete open source speech recognition software, covering HMM/GMMs, the conventional hybrid HMM/NN, and much more. If you care about end-to-end only, there is much more, e.g. Mozilla DeepSpeech, and most modern open source encoder-decoder-attention frameworks can do that (e.g. Lingvo etc).

Most of these encoder-decoder-attention framework can also do text-to-speech (TTS). Maybe you need a separate vocoder, but you will also find open source code for that.

For the assistant engine, there are also a couple of open source projects, e.g. Mycroft, LinTO, Rasa, Leon, Open Assistant, Susi, ...

Putting it all together is non-trivial, and requires lots of expert knowledge, and lots of work and time to get a good result. This is hard to do as a hobby project.

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#63

Post by ralfd »

ahnick wrote: post #25
athenot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use many Siri commands but a few come in handy: - "add milk to grocery list" — I have a reminder list called "Grocery" to make that happen. Makes it easy to add stuff as I realize I'm running low, then I can check it off in the Reminders app. - "create appointment next {day} at {time} {title}" — I never use that one when I'm next to my computer, but when I'm around the house or after a doctor visit, it's usua…

What I really like about Siri is the geofencing capability. "Siri, remind me when I get home to text Daniel" (or something of that nature) This way the reminder is not tied to a particular time, but instead tied to a location that is more relevant or convenient to carry out the task.

I should start using that!

How does Siri know what home is?

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#65

Post by ToFab123 »

kabdib wrote: post #42

The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default. Look: I'm not really happy running Windows Server to begin with [HN crowd: a decision that was not mine, by the way], so why do you have to have this stupid thing downloading and running all kinds of random executables that I have no idea what they do in my bloody server farm ? And yup, I have logs off all those things, and pager tr…

>The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default.

Cortana is not running as part of Windows Server 2016 by default . The default install option is no GUI and that option does not install Cortana. You will explicit have to choose that you want to install the "Desktop experience" in order to get Cortana. If you select to add an optional feature named "Desktop experience" it is fair enough that Cortana is there since she is (or now was) a part of Microsoft Desktop experience. Most typical server workloads run fine without the GUI (and Cortana).

Windows Server 2016 Installation Options: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#66

Post by ninkendo »

ralfd wrote: post #63
ahnick wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I really like about Siri is the geofencing capability. "Siri, remind me when I get home to text Daniel" (or something of that nature) This way the reminder is not tied to a particular time, but instead tied to a location that is more relevant or convenient to carry out the task.

I should start using that! How does Siri know what home is?

The address you have stored on your “me” card (the Contacts entry representing yourself.)

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#67

Post by TheRealSteel »

"Despite dropping the app in these regions, Cortana itself remains “an integral part” of the company’s business model to incorporate “conversational computing and productivity” into its products according to the spokesperson, so Microsoft doesn’t appear to be closing the coffin on it entirely."

Don't make a girl a promise... if you know you can't keep it.

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#68

Post by jotm »

Nerdfest wrote: post #47
kabdib wrote: post #42

The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default. Look: I'm not really happy running Windows Server to begin with [HN crowd: a decision that was not mine, by the way], so why do you have to have this stupid thing downloading and running all kinds of random executables that I have no idea what they do in my bloody server farm ? And yup, I have logs off all those things, and pager tr…

I seem to remember that even when Cortana is shut off, it was found to be listening and sending telemetry back to Microsoft. Based on their past behaviour, I'd guess that even is it is "removed", those elements will remain.

Well, speech recognition executables want access tnrough the firewall regularly, regardless of Cortana. So yeah, something is being sent.

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#69

Post by macintux »

pamitm wrote: post #56
coldtea wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a voice assistant might be less distracting than using your phone, but it's still distracting while driving, having to concentrate on what you say, the right commands, their feedback, etc.

Almost the same level of distraction as holding a conversation then. I can live with that.

Keep in mind that holding a conversation while driving is still dangerous if the conversation isn’t with someone else in the car.

Re: Farewell, Cortana

#70

Post by jotm »

kabdib wrote: post #42

The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default. Look: I'm not really happy running Windows Server to begin with [HN crowd: a decision that was not mine, by the way], so why do you have to have this stupid thing downloading and running all kinds of random executables that I have no idea what they do in my bloody server farm ? And yup, I have logs off all those things, and pager tr…

Funny how the LTSC version is the only Windows version that works best as a standalone desktop OS, where you install the software you want and no updates will break your configuration every half a year. But of course it's not recommended for desktop use, and you can't get a license as an individual user (I think even business users have restrictions).
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